By "It's definitely not a good time to be a Nazi," says a young boy wearily in the trailer for Taika Waititi's new Third Reich satire film, Jojo Rabbit. The clip gives a glimpse of the forthcoming dark comedy starring Sam Rockwell and Scarlett Johansson, which looks at Hitler Youth camps and their indoctrinated children. As well as writing, directing and producing the film for Fox Searchlight, Waititi will play an imaginary version of Hitler.
The official synopsis is as follows:
Writer director Taika Waititi, brings his signature style of humour and pathos to his latest film, JOJO RABBIT, a World War II satire that follows a lonely German boy (Roman Griffin Davis as JoJo) whose world view is turned upside down when he discovers his single mother (Scarlett Johansson) is hiding a young Jewish girl (Thomasin McKenzie) in their attic. Aided only by his idiotic imaginary friend, Adolf Hitler (Taika Waititi), Jojo must confront his blind nationalism.
Waititi has directed acclaimed films such as 2017 Marvel movie Thor: Ragnorak, and Sam Neil-fronted coming-of-age film Hunt for the Wilderpeople, and has been selected to direct Thor: Love and Thunder, starring Natalie Portman as the next iteration of Thor.
Films which make light of the darkest of subject matters have been on a strong run of form recently, with movies like Spike Lee's Blackkklansman and Jordan Peele's Get Out finding unfortunate relevance in 2019, and disguising serious subjects in films of a different genre.
As Mahershala Ali told Esquire last year of Green Book, the film in which he plays Jamaican-American pianist Don Shirley on a tour of the South, "You set the audience up for being able to have a good time but also slip a message in there that they need to hear."
Jojo Rabbit also follows a line of films poking fun at political regimes: Tarantino's 2009 film Inglorious Basterds was set against the backdrop of Nazi Germany, and featured fictional SS colonel Hans Landa, the role for which Christoph Waltz won an Academy Award. Last year political satire The Death of Stalin recreated the paranoia of the Soviet Era, with director Armando Iannucci saying that he wanted audiences to feel, "The sort of low-level anxiety that people must have [experienced] when they just went about their daily lives at the time."
Still, on paper the premise of Jojo Rabbit sounds alarming, and as such it has attracted controversy for its light-hearted take on the Nazi party at a time where anti-semitism and Right Wing ideologies are on the rise. However, like the novel it is adapted from - Caging Skies by Christine Leunens - the film sets out to explore the purity of love against a backdrop of hate, asks questions about the innocence of childhood and the conflicts within us, using comedy to Trojan Horse serious messages about prejudice and our perceived differences.
Premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival this week, Jojo Rabbit will be an interesting test, not of whether the world has a sense of humour when it comes to Nazi Germany, but whether they are listening to the real message underneath the laughs.
'Jojo Rabbit' is due to be released 1 January 2020
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