JOJO RABBIT Opens in Theaters October 16th -Check Out This New Trailer

Writer director Taika Waititi (THOR: RAGNAROK, HUNT FOR THE WILDERPEOPLE), brings his signature style of humor 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. Jojo Rabbit with a screenplay by and directed by Taika Waititi is based upon the book Caging Skies by Christine Leunens and stars Roman Griffin Davis, Thomasin McKenzie, Taika Waititi, Rebel Wilson, Stephen Merchant, Alfie Allen, with Sam Rockwell and Scarlett Johansson. 

JOJO RABBIT Opens in Theaters October 16th. Check out this new trailer:

Jojo Rabbit offers a sharply funny, yet profoundly stirring, child’s-eye view of a society gone mad with intolerance.  Drawing on his own Jewish heritage and his experiences growing up surrounded by prejudice, writer-director Taika Waititi (whose mother is Jewish, while his father is Māori) makes a powerful statement against hate with this pitch-black satire of the Nazi culture that gripped the German psyche at the height of WWII.  Waititi takes a story almost too appalling to approach with sober solemnity—that of a boy who, like many at that time, has been brainwashed into absolutely gung-ho devotion to Hitler. He then mines from it a dark, mesmerizing comedy that ultimately unravels the toxic ideas of anti-Semitism and persecution of the other.  Balancing on a comedic high-wire, Waititi mixes the fury of satire with an insistent sense of hope that fanaticism and hate can be overcome. 

            The film follows very much in the footsteps of some of Waititi’s personal filmmaking heroes:  Mel Brooks, Charlie Chaplin, Ernst Lubitsch and Stanley Kubrick to name a few.  Like those directors, Waititi was in search of a fresh way to re-visit the most unsettling of topics through the paradoxically moral force of out-and-out parody.  Waititi echoes Brooks in particular, as a Jewish actor disrupting the enduring power of Hitler’s image with a zany, ridiculing portrait.   But much as the film owes to its bold forbearers, Jojo Rabbit feels very much of our times, with its deeply human characters whose blinded foibles might amuse but whose inner predicaments are deadly real and pointedly relevant right now.