Reflective Encounters

“Anxiety dominates Brunch, as it takes the perspective of a stressed-out millennial in a coffee shop and frets about the ire from older customers. There’s a risk with films that depict mental health struggles in that they can default to a dour position. Brunch is able to offset this through stop-motion animation that acts like a comfort blanket, by evoking British children’s television of yore like Shaun the Sheep and Clangers.

Taking intergenerational conflict as its main theme, necessity dictates that characters are drawn in broad stereotypes, something which animation, with its roots in minstrelsy, has a shameful history in. Thankfully Brunch is punching up. There’s a literal gammon meant to represent white British masculinity at its most toxic and red-faced.

In fact, the short can be said to dismantle stereotypes as much as it reinforces them. The most obvious example of this is the main character himself who embodies the avocado-addicted stereotype of a millennial in the minds of boomers. The exotic avocado signifies an elitist cosmopolitanism whose decadence provides an easy answer as to why millennials are financially worse off. But as the pram topples over we realise the avocado is just a fruit. As such the quasi-mystical meanings we imbue it with, and the assumptions we may make of those who eat them, become patently ridiculous.”

— Cathy Brennan