Let’s pretend we’re bunny rabbits
Much has been said of JOJO RABBIT; let’s just say it has its heart in the right place while wanting to have its cake and eat it too
“You’re not a Nazi! You’re a ten-year old boy who likes uniforms and wants to belong to a club.” There, in a nutshell, is Jojo Rabbit: the story of a kid who is seduced by evil under false pretenses, and, like Pinocchio as he heads into Toyland, finds out later — much too late — what he signed up for.
Jojo, real name Johannes (Roman Griffin Davis), is an awkward tyke living in a small German town in the final days of WWII; his father is away at war and he and his mother (Scarlett Johansson) grieve for an older sister. And Jojo is a fanatic little Nazi who is excited about joining the Hitler Youth; partly because he has been seduced by the sturm und drang presentation, partly because, being a scrawny type, he wants to be accepted by his peers. It’s a classic schoolboy dilemma — with a political twist.
From the very beginning, Taika Waititi’s film, a loose adaptation of a novel by Christine Leunens, presents itself as a satire —it’s there in the way that the Beatles’ I Want to Hold Your Hand (here presented in its German-language recording) underscores the credits’ archival footage of Nazi rallies, how it shows that…
