Movie Review: Jojo Rabbit pt. 1

As a movie-lover, I've decided to write a series of movie reviews for my blog. Please note that everything here is just my personal opinion!

I wondered for a while what movie I should start off with, and decided on Jojo Rabbit. I watched this for the first time a while back in 2020 right before COVID-19, and it was one of the first movies I cried watching. I've watched it many more times since, and it remains one of my favorite movies of all time. So, here's part 1 of the review!

Jojo Rabbit (2019)

Directed by Taika Waititi

10/10

This movie takes place during World War II and it is presented through the eyes of a ten year old boy, Jojo. Jojo has the passion of a Nazi, and he even has Adolf Hitler as an imaginary friend. Or so he says so himself. We can obviously see that Jojo is not a real Nazi. The movie starts when Jojo joins a military camp to fight for Germany. But soon, due to an accident, Jojo gets ‘kicked out’. And then not much after, the boy realizes that his mother took in a Jew, Elsa. Only when Jojo bonds with Elsa, and experiences many hardships, does he appear at the end, stronger and grown up.

As I was watching this movie, I found many symbolic characters meant to serve a purpose. The most iconic of these was Adolf Hitler himself. I saw in the first half of the movie that Adolf Hitler was an obvious protagonist. Through the eyes of Jojo, he was a fun, supportive friend full of jokes. During this first part, I could almost understand why Nazis supported their actions. But after meeting the Jew, Elsa, Hitler changes. He becomes more forceful toward Jojo to ‘not let the Jew get inside his German mind’, and turns into more of an antagonist. As a mere character of Jojo’s imagination, I could see from this that it wasn’t Hitler changing, but Jojo who was seeing the world as a bigger place than he’d known, in a world where Hitler isn’t as great a person as he had known. A rabbit is also a great example of a symbolic character. When Jojo gets teased over being cowardly like a rabbit, Hitler encourages him that being like a rabbit is better than it seems; that a rabbit is a clever animal that survives the harsh world every day with courage rather than cowardliness. This links to the title of the movie itself, expressing the war as ‘the harsh world’ and Jojo as ‘a rabbit’ which he becomes throughout the movie. The butterfly that Jojo’s mother was talking about could also be something that is more than meets the eye though I’m not sure if the director actually intended it. After Jojo’s mother explains what it feels like to be in love and uses the expression, ‘a stomach full of butterflies’, a single blue butterfly later in the movie warns the audience beforehand about the tragic death of her. Like this, perhaps Jojo was linked to a rabbit, and his mother, a butterfly.

So this is part 1. Look out for part 2!