Jojo Rabbit / YMMV

Accidental Aesop: How valuable is life if you can produce it en masse? This is best seen in the Fräulein's pride at having had 18 children for the glory of Germany, only to strap a grenade to a German child and send him to his death.
Adaptation Displacement: Not many people are aware that the film was based on the 2004 novel Caging Skies.
Alternative Character Interpretation:
- Jojo seemingly recovered from taking a grenade point-blank with only a scratch to show for it, though everyone around him says he's horribly deformed, and Elsa draws a picture of him with one side of his face damaged. Given he has an imaginary friend, it could be that Jojo is imagining his injuries to be much more superficial than they really are as a coping mechanism.
- Is Jojo's father really as stern as Rosie's impression of him makes him come across? Or was she just venting her personal frustrations with Jojo's behavior and the stress of being part of the German resistance through her role playing?
Award Snub:
- The film's six Academy Award nominations didn't include Taika Waititi for Best Director (though he did receive a screenplay nom, which he wound up winning). Some see this as an unfortunate consequence of 2019 being so jam-packed with exceptional directing work that inevitably someone worthy of recognition was going to be left out of the five available spots, though other film critics think his work was more deserving than Todd Phillips for Joker.
- While Scarlett Johansson's performance was recognized with an Oscar nomination, the same can’t be said for the similarly well-received performances by Roman Griffin Davis, Thomasin McKenzie, Taika Waititi, and Sam Rockwell. In the case of Griffin Davis, it likely wouldn't be a stretch to say that his young age hurt him when faced with many highly respected vets in his category. As for Waititi, a comedic performance as Adolf Hitler was always going to have an uphill battle receiving awards attention. Both them and Rockwell also had the problem of being in highly competitive categories that year. McKenzie, however, would have been competing in what many called the weakest category of the year, so there's much less to excuse the snub, outside of Johansson having a very buzzy year that likely contributed to her stealing votes.
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
- Hitler wears a Native American headdress in one scene for seemingly no reason at all.^note
- The clones, a group of identical members of the Hitler Youth who require "walking".
Catharsis Factor: It is incredibly satisfying watching Jojo kick Adolf out the window after he growls, “Fuck off, Hitler!"
Critical Dissonance: The film divided critics, though that reception was ultimately more positive than negative. Audiences as a whole were much more receptive of it.
Crosses the Line Twice: The only way that a comedy about Nazi Germany could have been made was if it were directed by a Jewish person — which Taika Waititi is. It helps that Waititi also plays Hitler as a total Large Ham... until the climax, that is.
Genius Bonus:
- At the end, Klenzendorf and Finkel's uniforms are adorned with pink triangles. Pink triangles were the identification symbol for homosexuals in concentration camps.
- Hitler calls Elsa a "female Jewish Jesse Owens." Owens was a black athlete who won four gold medals in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin in an especially embarrassing slap in the face to Hitler's assertions of Aryan supremacy, causing him to pull a Screw This, I'm Outta Here for the medal ceremony.
- The imaginary Hitler who is constantly smoking is weirdly reflective of the real Hitler's historical hatred of smoking.
- The deleted scene with Hermann Göring has him shaking uncontrollably. The real Göring had a morphine addiction that lasted until the end of the war.
Harsher in Hindsight: It's easy to imagine the pain Elsa feels when Captain Deertz flips through Jojo's book and comments on the many painful deaths that Jojo has drawn for her fiancé Nathan. What the viewer doesn't learn until much later is that Nathan had already died of tuberculosis, and she knew it.
He Panned It, Now He Sucks!:
- A.A. Dowd of the AV Club raised a lot of ire for his assertion that there's not much to the film "if you take out the jokes." Many commenters were baffled at why you'd deliberately ignore the main reason for a movie's existence (namely a satirical comedy) to argue that it's bad.
- Another article from the AV Club argued that Jojo Rabbit isn't "the new Life Is Beautiful", which met with vehement opposition in its comment section.
He Really Can Act:
- This movie was Roman Griffin Davis's first performance, and not only did he nail it, but he got a Golden Globe nomination.
- Taika Waititi's portrayal of a more genuine Hitler after Jojo's disillusionment with him is legitimately scary, and a far cry from his typical goofy layabout characters, even more than IG-11.
Ho Yay: Captain K and Freddie Finkel seem to be attached at the hip, and at one point share eye contact for perhaps longer than they should. Their hand-designed battle uniforms also feature a prominent amount of pink triangles (the symbol the Nazis used to identify homosexual prisoners).
Love to Hate: When he stops being silly, Waititi's Hitler becomes a bone-chilling portrayal of the manipulative cruelty inherent to fascism.
Memetic Mutation:
- Due to the movie having the same name as the popular JoJo's Bizarre Adventure series, many fans have joked that Jojo is secretly a member of the Joestar family, and that his imaginary friend Hitler is actually his Stand. It helps that JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Battle Tendency is set on the brink of World War II. Amusingly, the film includes a joke about Hitler having four balls. Guess who else has four balls.
- Jokes about kids from other countries involved in World War II having the world leader of that country as an imaginary friend (like a Japanese kid having Hideki Tojo as an imaginary friend) are also fairly common among fans of the film if YouTube comments are anything to go by.
- Jojo saying “Fuck off, Hitler!" before kicking Hitler out the window is commonly used to make fun of Hitler (such as framing it as coming from the art school that rejected him) or as a reaction/exaggerated punchline to people who engage in annoying behaviour or those who are quick to falsely accuse others of being a Nazi.
- Jojo greeting Hitler by saying "Hi, Adolf" as he emerges from behind a tree is often used as an insult to evil people and companies, with Hitler being labelled as said person or company in the first panel. Less hyperbolically, it's also used to make fun of places that are hotspots for Nazis such as /pol/ of 4chan or the comments sections of Hava Nagila/Item Bounce from Kirby Air Ride.
Moral Event Horizon:
- The Nazis cross it in the eyes of Jojo when they hang Rosie. On a meta level, the Nazis cross the moral event horizon the moment we know they're Nazis.
- The Fraulein crosses it when she tells a German boy to go hug an invading soldier, then pulls the pin on a grenade strapped to his back.
Questionable Casting: According to Waititi, the only way he was able to get a studio to fund the movie was under the condition that he (a Kiwi of Māori, Irish, and Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry) play Hitler himself, so they wouldn't have had to do that awkward casting call.
Signature Scene:
- Jojo seeing his mother's shoes and looking up to see Rosie's body hanging on a noose.
- Jojo saying "Fuck off, Hitler!" and kicking his imaginary friend out of the window. Pretty much the entire movie exists to build up to that one scene.
Spiritual Successor: This movie has come to be the rebuttal to people complaining that works like "Blazing Saddles could never be made nowadays due to political correctness.
"They lose me after the bunker scene."
Squick: The ten-year-old girls of the Jungvolk being taught how to get pregnant. Thankfully, it's only alluded to.

YMMV / Jojo Rabbit

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