In a world where neo-Nazism is on the rise and a conservative Hollywood, it’s hard to imagine how a film like "Jojo Rabbit" with "Ten-year-old German boy Jojo dreams of becoming the most perfect fascist" as a synopsis was made. of.
Of course, "Jojo Rabbit" is not the first satirical comedy to make fun of the Nazis and the Führer. Disney, the publisher of "Jojo Rabbit," as early as 1943, made Donald Duck star in the satirical animation "Der Fuehrer's Face", and Chaplin in 1940's "The Great Dictatorship" "The Author" contributed a funny image of Hitler that went down in film history.
The new and old versions of "Gold Producers" deconstructed the Third Reich from the perspective of the entertainment industry, and the more recent "Shameless Bastard" boldly killed Hitler in a movie theater, completely rewriting history. Don't forget that Robert Bernini's "Life is Beautiful", although not a satirical comedy in the strict sense, it wraps the tear-jerking cruelty with tenderness and humor, making it one of the most powerful concentration camp movies.
But "Jojo Rabbit" is different from these works. "Jojo Rabbit" is not just a satirical comedy, it is a war film from a purely children's perspective (although the protagonist seems to be in the wrong camp), and it is also a coming-of-age story of the age of war . The protagonist who is about to grow up is 10-year-old Jojo, with a little golden curly hair, a round face, red eyes, and no shoelaces. He is about to step into the Nazi youth camp and become a glorious little fascist.
What the high-spirited Jojo doesn't know is that in the near future, the empire he believes in and the idols he worships will be destroyed, and the enemies he wants to kill will become friends and relatives. He will recognize the ridiculousness of war, and this ridiculousness is so sad.
The whole "Jojo Rabbit" follows the perspective of Jojo, showing a Germany at the end of World War II, almost defeated but almost everyone is still immersed in an irrational collective carnival. The Nazi military uniform is like the boy scout uniform of "Moonrise Kingdom". With Wes Anderson's bright colors, all adults have become funny and blind Hitler followers like children, and all children are angry war machines full of political anger.
Our Jojo is of course also a small pacesetter under the Nazi ideology. Although hesitation and lack of self-confidence are his daily routine, Jojo is sure that he will stand proudly beside the head of state in the future. His room was covered with Hitler posters and Nazi flags. He wore a Nazi youth camp uniform every day. He was depressed for three weeks because his grandfather was not blond. But Jojo is already standing next to the head of state: like most other children, Jojo also has an imaginary friend, and this friend who will be angry like a ten-year-old and encourage Jojo with childish words every day is right. It was Adolf Hitler himself.
My friend Adolf and Heil his best method
Almost a third of the jokes in "Jojo Rabbit" come from the imaginary head of state played by director Taiga Viditi himself. The film begins with an unexciting mobilization speech delivered by the head of state to Joe Joe who is about to enter the camp, accompanied by a passionate German version of "I Want To Hold Your Hand" and a historical clip of the public "Heil Hitler", Joe Joe's good friend Adolf trains Joe Joe how to "Heil Hitler" correctly and full of air.
"Jojo Rabbit" is adapted from the darker-tone novel "Caging Skies", and there is no such imaginary friend Hitler in the original book. The director originally created this wonderful setting, and Fox Searchlight has only one requirement for this bold idea: Director Tower himself starred in this low-intellectual version of Hitler. Half of the Jewish descent completed this role in a colorful manner. This Hitler dutifully accompanied Jojo, doing what the child imagined that an adult should do, wearing an iconic moustache, and quite eye-catching. With a small belly, it is easy to get anxious and smoke when anxious (although Hitler himself hates smoking very much).
But after all, this Hitler is just a product in the mind of a ten-year-old kid. He only knows the limited things that a ten-year-old kid knows, and he keeps repeating Jojo's most superficial understanding of the world. As the empire gradually disintegrated, the friendship between Jojo and this imagined friend was faltering.
Although the ten-year-old Mind Hitler's setting has brought a subversive comic effect, this Hitler is a tragic embodiment of the brainwashed result of Jojo. He is the only image of a father around Jojo, a mixture of Jojo 's father who was far away on the battlefield and the "hero" heads of state who only appeared in newspaper broadcasts. How lonely Qiaoqiao needs a father, a mentor, and a conscientious and sensible adult to teach him how to grow up and how to correctly understand the world, but in this era, extreme ideology is the only education he receives, and Only this nondescript Hitler was by his side.
The other adults around Qiaoqiao who should have acted as fathers, some were still immersed in the dream of the empire, and some had completely disillusioned and released themselves. In the training camp, Jojo, good friend Yorkie, and a large group of ambitious boys are taught how to assassinate and throw bombs, while the girls learn how to care and how to give birth to children of noble blood for the empire. They learn the theoretical knowledge about Jews, and they are constantly being taught that Jews are monsters with long horns and long tails, and they see Jews wanting to report or kill them.
With these seemingly ridiculous training camp activities, "Jojo Rabbit" has established a complete and comprehensive system, showing how the imperial machine has cultivated generations of loyal followers in a seamless manner, and how it uses a patterned collective to give These fatherless children have a sense of belonging to their homeland. At dinner time, Qiao Qiao, who saw his mother happy because the war was about to end, was furious and slapped the table and shouted: "We will crush our enemies into dross and use their graves as toilets." The ten-year-old child is so skilled in this set of incitement, but he doesn't know what he is talking about, let alone loving the motherland and looking forward to the end of the war are two things that are not contradictory at all.
If it weren't for a critical moment, Qiao Qiao would have collapsed with his beliefs. But at that moment, his innocent and kind nature overwhelmed his desire to identify with his parents and his eagerness to join the group, and the butterfly effect triggered at that moment gave him the last chance to escape the whirlpool. Close the door to the dangerous world. In the safe space called home, the two female characters re-taught Jojo how to know himself and the crazy world he lives in.
Butterflies on the battlefield
Mom told Jojo that when you like someone, you will feel butterflies flying in your stomach. Jojo never expected that, as a noble Aryan, a proud Hitler soldier, the butterfly in his stomach restlessly turned out to be a Jewish girl.
Jojo, who was at home, accidentally discovered that his mother had hidden a Jewish girl in the attic. This Jewish girl who is much older than him is called Aisha, who has gone through the floors and crevices of many families, and has recently been taken in by the kindly mother Jojo. This living Jew is not at all a monster with horns and a tail in the textbook. In his contact with Aisha, his hostility towards Aisha gradually turned into curiosity and respect for the Jewish nation, and his relationship with Aisha gradually experienced friendship. , Heartbeat, and eventually become family affection.
Aisha is played by Thomasine MacKenzie (Leave No Traces). When directing Thomasine’s scenes, the tower director asked her not only to study the characters from historical data, but also to refer to "Mean Girls" and " The image of the wicked woman in Sisters Sid . Although Aisha, a Jewish girl, is hidden in the dark, she is not a victim in the traditional sense: she is full of personality, and she is also very good at irony, and has almost no self-pity or expectation.
This is not just a story of a Nazi meeting a Jew, but also a story of a simple boy meeting a girl. After experiencing his "first love", Jojo finally understands that Germans and Jews are equal human beings, a simple truth that two-year-olds should understand. Watching Jojo gradually change, abandon the hatred and prejudice that had occupied his soul for a long time, and become a normal boy who often makes jokes. Aisha said: "Jojo, you are not a Nazi, you are just a lover. A ten-year-old boy in a funny uniform, who wants to be a member of the club."
The appearance of Aisha directly contributed to Qiaoqiao's transformation, but there is also an amazing woman who has been indirectly influencing Xiao Qiaoqiao subtly. The mother played by Scarlett Johansson is the most dazzling light in the brightly colored "Jojo Rabbit". The innocence and kindness of Xiao Qiao Qiao's nature have been inherited from her without reservation.
Qiao Qiao’s mother is an ordinary mother. She wears the same pajamas as her son, arranges her hair thinly before going to bed, teaches her son to tie his shoes, and talks to the training camp teacher after his son is injured. But she is also the mother everyone dreams of. She is lively, she wears a pair of pretty red leather shoes, likes to drink red wine, likes to dance, is crazy when having fun, and is infinitely gentle when hugging the child; she can blink her eyes Pretending that the outside world is dangerous, you can wipe a handful of ashes and pretend to be the husband returning home, and immediately twist up and dance happily.
Such a mother taught Jojo, who only had the Nazis in his heart, how to be an ordinary 10-year-old child, and taught Aisha, who had no childhood, how to be a woman. Jojo felt the butterflies flying in her stomach, and Aisha learned to look directly into the tiger's eyes. Mom also let Jojo know that war is not all of life, and shouldn't even be a part of life. When everyone wanted Jojo to be a fighter, my mother only wanted him to be an ordinary real person: romantic, free, hopeful, and ready to dance.
But his mother was not an empty-headed naive. By the gallows in the square where members of the resistance organization were hanging, his mother broke off Jojo's head and forced him to look directly at the corpse in the wind. Qiao Qiao asked: "What did they do?" Mom replied: "They did what they could do."
When Jojo finally took off his Nazi military uniform, he found a blue butterfly on the street. For the first time, Jojo ran after the butterfly like an innocent child, but finally came to the heartbreaking pair of red shoes. The butterfly strung the girls and women who influenced Jojo , but the image was cruel in its beauty. The war era of male violence and carnival is coming to an end. Hitler died in Berlin. The image of father and mother fell together. Jojo , who had just returned to a child under the gentleness and tenacity of women, grew up in a heartbreaking moment.
"This is not a good time to be a Nazi"
Jojo met Yorkie, a good friend in the training camp, on the street where the fortress was erected. Jojo excitedly told Yorkie that she was about to have a girlfriend, a Jewish girl, and Yorkie was very happy for him: "Girlfriend! Jojo, you really have you!" The thorough kid has long understood how ridiculous the hatred of Jews is. And when the war that is hard to guarantee is coming, no one pays attention to the identity of the Jew anymore. After all, this superficial and ridiculous hostility cannot stop the death on the battlefield.
In a slow motion of nearly twenty minutes, the final battle started. Between the guns, Jojo saw everything. The shepherd raised his gun, and the long-disillusioned training camp commander joined the battle in his multicolored uniform and carrying his horn. The girls in the training camp fiddled with weapons cluelessly, while the group of boys, with a grenade in their hands, cheered and rushed into the rain of bullets for the first field operation.
All of this, all the beliefs and slogans, are so funny and meaningless. Those children with doubts or excitement are nothing but cannon fodder to delay the collapse of the empire, but the outcome of that failure has long been written.
From the eyes of a German child, "Jojo Rabbit" shows the disagreement of a group of people who are placed on the opposite side of the world in the war . The trauma of war never distinguishes justice or evil. When the ending of history is written, the street in front of Qiao Qiao's house sounded the shooting of prisoners of war, and the eyes of ordinary people were numb.
They finally know that it is not a good time to be a Nazi, but this light lesson from the children will be a heavy sin for this nation forever.
"Jojo Rabbit" is a very emotional movie, and it is as uncomfortable as it is laughable. A large part of the success of "Jojo Rabbit" in inducing empathy comes from the casting of the protagonist Jojo. The little actor Roman Griffin Davis, who played for the first time in the movie, looks like a young Julie. Delpe, naive and ignorant, is distressingly fragile.
Scarlett Johansson once again reminded the audience of what a serious and good actor she is, and this diverse image of a mother is expected to earn her an Oscar nomination. But the performances in "Jojo Rabbit" are almost all Oscar-level. Hitler and Thomasin’s Jewish girls are amazing. The young actor Archie Yates’ Yorkie is like a group of vigorous little cream. Finn Morchant’s secret police chief used a five-minute turn of "Heil Hitler" to contribute to the most intense and hilarious part of the film.
But the most brilliant supporting role is undoubtedly the captain of the deep cabinet who draws enchanting eyeliner played by Sam Rockwell. The best supporting actor of last year revealed that when he performed this role, he wanted to find inspiration from works such as "Schindler's List", but finally decided to play a "Bill Murray with a German accent who was disillusioned with the empire" " . Regardless of whether Rockwell's Bill Murray's imitation is not in place, this superficially screaming, heartbroken and mournful character succeeded in becoming the most memorable supporting role in "Jojo Rabbit", and eventually it will collapse with a strange outfit and a building. The international kindness earned countless tears.
A survey conducted by The Guardian last year showed that 41% of Americans and 66% of American millennials no longer know what "Auschwitz" means. But the message of "Jojo Rabbit" is not to tell us how bad the Nazis are, nor does it intend to get a good sense of self by satirizing the Nazis.
"Jojo Rabbit" is just a valuable use of a child's perspective to reinterpret the ideology under war and power, and reiterate a universal value that is not new, but needs to be emphasized in the present: unfounded hatred stems from ignorance. , And when we let go of our prejudices, we will find that we are nothing but human beings. Jews do not have horns, German children are just children.
When riding a bike and meeting a group of wounded soldiers, his mother smiled and waved: "Welcome back boys, now go home and kiss your mother!" After the war ended, Jojo, who had survived the war, met Yorkie on the street and Xiao Pang was forced to go to the battlefield. He escaped from the dead again. At this time, he had already taken off his military uniform and wore a crumpled vest. He waved his chubby hand and said:
"Goodbye Jojo, I'm going home to kiss my mother."
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