‘Jojo Rabbit’ Is One Of The Strangest Adaptations Ever – Here’s How It Differs From The Book
By Leigh Monson/Oct. 22, 2019 7:00 am EST
Adaptation, by its very nature, is transformative. A screenwriter must necessarily make changes to another form of written work in order for that work to function in the medium of film. Fans of the original work will often judge the value of the adaptation by fidelity to the source material, judging a film by how much it adheres to the story beats, tone, and even specific dialogue that they remember and appreciate from the work they grew to love in the first place. But sometimes the adaptational process subjects the original work to such transformative pressures that it’s barely recognizable.Take, for instance, Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit. Ostensibly, Waititi adapted the screenplay from a novel by Christine Leunens titled Caging Skies, but if you’re familiar with the kinds of films Waititi makes, Caging Skies seems like an exceedingly odd choice to inspire this particular filmmaker. Most notably, Caging Skies is a very, very bleak story. It is so bleak, in fact, that even though the book jacket for the recent U.S. printing describes the story as “darkly comic,” that darkness is so stifling that I struggle to understand why anyone would think it’s remotely funny. And yet, when you look at Jojo Rabbit, the bones of this story are still there, even if radically altered to serve different ends.
This post contains spoilers for Jojo Rabbit.
The Boyhood Whimsy and Coming of Age of Jojo Rabbit
Waititi’s film follows a preteen boy named Jojo growing up in World War II-era Germany. Jojo lives with his mother, as his father went off to fight in the war and never returned, and he participates in the Hitler Youth. Acting as a surrogate father is Jojo’s imaginary friend, a wildly flamboyant and childish personification of Hitler himself as portrayed by Waititi. Jojo is overtaken by nationalistic fervor for his country, much to his mother’s concern, which she masks behind eccentricity in trying to keep him childish and free from hateful indoctrination.However, Jojo’s life changes when an accident during a Hitler Youth activity leaves him injured from a grenade blast, scarring his face. It’s then that he comes to realize that maybe he and his mother are not alone in their home, as he discovers a Jewish teenager named Elsa living in their walls. Elsa threatens Jojo’s life should he tell anyone, but Jojo worries about what will happen to his mother if word got out that they were harboring a Jew. So Jojo and Elsa are left at an impasse, as neither wants to tell Jojo’s mother about their knowledge of one another for fear of the danger that would put her in.So Jojo endeavors to study his unexpected roommate in a sort of anthropological study of Judaism, which is largely founded on the farcically demonic caricatures he was taught in the Hitler Youth but is gradually chipped away as he comes to recognize Elsa’s humanity, even if he has trouble admitting it as such to himself. Meanwhile, Jojo starts to suspect that maybe his mother is more involved with the resistance to the German government than he had ever suspected, and just as he starts to recognize his prepubescent romantic feelings for Elsa, Jojo discovers his mother hanging dead in the city square, executed for her treason.Though initially angry at Elsa, Jojo still makes efforts to hide her from government investigation. She’s the last bit of family he has left in the world, and he starts to realize that perhaps Jews aren’t the monsters he was indoctrinated to believe. This arc completes when Jojo finally murders his pleading, sniveling faux-friend, Faux Hitler, leaving the ways in which he was misled in childhood behind him in favor of enlightened empathy.As the Allied forces invade, liberating the city, Elsa asks Jojo who has won the war. Jojo, in a moment of weakness, tells her that the Germans have won, but he quickly reassures her that he’ll help her escape in the post-battle chaos. As she leaves the house for the first time since being hidden there, it becomes obvious that the Allies have won, that Jojo told a fib, and that she is free. The final moments are happy ones, as the pair laugh joyously at the possibilities that await them.
Why One Story Became Two
Caging Skies is making very pointed critiques of German Nazi nationalism, toxic masculinity, confusion of possession for love, and the ways that men hold women hostage because they cannot cope with their own pain. Any sense of levity the book has is quickly subsumed by the bleak hopelessness of its message, leaving us alone with a sickly twisted narrator who is incapable of recognizing the moral of his own story. It’s not a story about how people can change and grow, but rather about how people are doomed to fall victim to the harmful messaging that they internalize in their culture.Taika Waititi joked during the Q&A after Jojo Rabbit’s screening at Fantastic Fest that he only read about half of Caging Skies on his mother’s recommendation before writing the screenplay, and it would not surprise me in the least to learn that Waititi never did finish reading it. Certain changes to the source material are obvious for a Taika Waititi project, such as the focus on Jojo’s absent father figure, the emphasis of Jojo’s coming of age, and the film’s generally lighter tone and reliance on humor. If Waititi had made a straight adaptation of Caging Skies, it would be just about the most unlikely thing to ever grace Waititi’s filmography, spitting in the face of the optimism of films like Boy and Hunt for the Wilderpeople.So why adapt Caging Skies at all? Obviously I cannot speak for Waititi, but it seems as though Caging Skies was a form of incidental inspiration. He read part of a book that he probably didn’t care for much, then rewrote the story to suit his own ends, dabbling with themes of boyhood and growing up in a comic, fanciful manner that pays enough homage to the structure and story beats of the novel that it just can’t be cited as a wholly original work. Jojo Rabbit probably feels like such a strange adaptation because it’s hardly an adaptation at all, adding subplots about authority figures in Jojo’s life that have no comparable equivalent in the novel and completely excising anything that contradicts the idea that Jojo is capable of overcoming the culture he was born into. Like any adaptation, Jojo Rabbit took on some of the personality of the person doing the adapting. What makes Jojo Rabbit unique is that the writer took something he likely objected to and transformed it into something he loved.
‘Jojo Rabbit’ Is One Of The Strangest Adaptations Ever – Here’s How It Differs From The Book
By Leigh Monson/Oct. 22, 2019 7:00 am EST
Adaptation, by its very nature, is transformative. A screenwriter must necessarily make changes to another form of written work in order for that work to function in the medium of film. Fans of the original work will often judge the value of the adaptation by fidelity to the source material, judging a film by how much it adheres to the story beats, tone, and even specific dialogue that they remember and appreciate from the work they grew to love in the first place. But sometimes the adaptational process subjects the original work to such transformative pressures that it’s barely recognizable.Take, for instance, Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit. Ostensibly, Waititi adapted the screenplay from a novel by Christine Leunens titled Caging Skies, but if you’re familiar with the kinds of films Waititi makes, Caging Skies seems like an exceedingly odd choice to inspire this particular filmmaker. Most notably, Caging Skies is a very, very bleak story. It is so bleak, in fact, that even though the book jacket for the recent U.S. printing describes the story as “darkly comic,” that darkness is so stifling that I struggle to understand why anyone would think it’s remotely funny. And yet, when you look at Jojo Rabbit, the bones of this story are still there, even if radically altered to serve different ends.
This post contains spoilers for Jojo Rabbit.
This post contains spoilers for Jojo Rabbit.
The Boyhood Whimsy and Coming of Age of Jojo Rabbit
Waititi’s film follows a preteen boy named Jojo growing up in World War II-era Germany. Jojo lives with his mother, as his father went off to fight in the war and never returned, and he participates in the Hitler Youth. Acting as a surrogate father is Jojo’s imaginary friend, a wildly flamboyant and childish personification of Hitler himself as portrayed by Waititi. Jojo is overtaken by nationalistic fervor for his country, much to his mother’s concern, which she masks behind eccentricity in trying to keep him childish and free from hateful indoctrination.However, Jojo’s life changes when an accident during a Hitler Youth activity leaves him injured from a grenade blast, scarring his face. It’s then that he comes to realize that maybe he and his mother are not alone in their home, as he discovers a Jewish teenager named Elsa living in their walls. Elsa threatens Jojo’s life should he tell anyone, but Jojo worries about what will happen to his mother if word got out that they were harboring a Jew. So Jojo and Elsa are left at an impasse, as neither wants to tell Jojo’s mother about their knowledge of one another for fear of the danger that would put her in.So Jojo endeavors to study his unexpected roommate in a sort of anthropological study of Judaism, which is largely founded on the farcically demonic caricatures he was taught in the Hitler Youth but is gradually chipped away as he comes to recognize Elsa’s humanity, even if he has trouble admitting it as such to himself. Meanwhile, Jojo starts to suspect that maybe his mother is more involved with the resistance to the German government than he had ever suspected, and just as he starts to recognize his prepubescent romantic feelings for Elsa, Jojo discovers his mother hanging dead in the city square, executed for her treason.Though initially angry at Elsa, Jojo still makes efforts to hide her from government investigation. She’s the last bit of family he has left in the world, and he starts to realize that perhaps Jews aren’t the monsters he was indoctrinated to believe. This arc completes when Jojo finally murders his pleading, sniveling faux-friend, Faux Hitler, leaving the ways in which he was misled in childhood behind him in favor of enlightened empathy.As the Allied forces invade, liberating the city, Elsa asks Jojo who has won the war. Jojo, in a moment of weakness, tells her that the Germans have won, but he quickly reassures her that he’ll help her escape in the post-battle chaos. As she leaves the house for the first time since being hidden there, it becomes obvious that the Allies have won, that Jojo told a fib, and that she is free. The final moments are happy ones, as the pair laugh joyously at the possibilities that await them.
The Dark Hearts of Broken People in Caging Skies
Why One Story Became Two
Caging Skies is making very pointed critiques of German Nazi nationalism, toxic masculinity, confusion of possession for love, and the ways that men hold women hostage because they cannot cope with their own pain. Any sense of levity the book has is quickly subsumed by the bleak hopelessness of its message, leaving us alone with a sickly twisted narrator who is incapable of recognizing the moral of his own story. It’s not a story about how people can change and grow, but rather about how people are doomed to fall victim to the harmful messaging that they internalize in their culture.Taika Waititi joked during the Q&A after Jojo Rabbit’s screening at Fantastic Fest that he only read about half of Caging Skies on his mother’s recommendation before writing the screenplay, and it would not surprise me in the least to learn that Waititi never did finish reading it. Certain changes to the source material are obvious for a Taika Waititi project, such as the focus on Jojo’s absent father figure, the emphasis of Jojo’s coming of age, and the film’s generally lighter tone and reliance on humor. If Waititi had made a straight adaptation of Caging Skies, it would be just about the most unlikely thing to ever grace Waititi’s filmography, spitting in the face of the optimism of films like Boy and Hunt for the Wilderpeople.So why adapt Caging Skies at all? Obviously I cannot speak for Waititi, but it seems as though Caging Skies was a form of incidental inspiration. He read part of a book that he probably didn’t care for much, then rewrote the story to suit his own ends, dabbling with themes of boyhood and growing up in a comic, fanciful manner that pays enough homage to the structure and story beats of the novel that it just can’t be cited as a wholly original work. Jojo Rabbit probably feels like such a strange adaptation because it’s hardly an adaptation at all, adding subplots about authority figures in Jojo’s life that have no comparable equivalent in the novel and completely excising anything that contradicts the idea that Jojo is capable of overcoming the culture he was born into. Like any adaptation, Jojo Rabbit took on some of the personality of the person doing the adapting. What makes Jojo Rabbit unique is that the writer took something he likely objected to and transformed it into something he loved.
