Waititi, Taika, dir. Jojo Rabbit

 Jojo Rabbit is a black comedy film based on Christine Leunens’ novel Caging Skies. It tells the tale of 10-year-old Johannes “Jojo” Betzler (Roman Griffin Davies), an avid, zealous Hitler Youth member who finds out his mother (Scarlet Johansson) resists Nazi rule, hiding the Jewish Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) in their attic. The film departs from the novel by the addition of Jojo’s imaginary friend: an immature, buffoonish Adolf Hitler, played by Waititi—a self-professed “Polynesian Jew”—himself.

The film won the top prize of the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival, and was nominated for six Oscars, winning Best Adapted Screenplay. Yet the movie was not without criticism, which was mainly directed at its comedic portrayal of Nazis: Waititi’s Hitler is an impotent, The Great Dictator-esque idiot; Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell), the sympathetic and ultimately self-sacrificing ‘good Nazi’ officer who acts as Jojo’s surrogate father, is queer; the brutish Fräulein Rahm (Rebel Wilson) leans heavily into female-Nazis-as-bestial tropes; and Captain Deertz (Stephen Merchant) is a perverse, alien, yet incredibly threatening Gestapo officer.

This leaves only Jojo himself as round Nazi character. As he gradually comes to terms with his developing feelings for Elsa, he starts to defy his ‘friend’ Adolf more and more. This culminates in a scene in which Jojo kicks Hitler out of a window; whether this achieves Waititi’s stated aim of producing “anti-hate satire” is left to the viewer to decide.

Jojo Rabbit hence exists in the category of ‘Hitler humour’ (Gölz 174) cinema, alongside films such as The Great Dictator (1940), The Producers (1967), Mein Führer – Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler (2007) and Er ist wieder da (2015). Like these films, Jojo Rabbit ridicules Hitler by reducing him to a comedic character, which means that Waititi’s portrayal is unfit for assessing the historical Hitler; but the film is useful for studying humourous representations of him. Alternatively, the character Jojo can provide a productive angle for inquiry into representation of Hitler Youth members, for he is the only non-clichéd Nazi character in the film.

Author of this entry: Martijn Loos.

Waititi, Taika, dir. Jojo Rabbit. United States: Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2019.