Jojo Betzler is ten years old, and he is the most enthusiastic Nazi in all of Germany.

This is not played for shock. It’s played for recognition. Jojo lives in a world where every adult authority has told him the same story since birth: Germany is great, the Führer is a god, Jews are monsters with horns and tails who sleep hanging from the ceiling like bats and can read your thoughts. Jojo has never met a Jewish person. He’s never had reason to question anything he’s been told. He’s a child who has absorbed his culture’s values completely—which is exactly what children are designed to do. The film’s opening credits drive this home by setting footage of frenzied Hitler Youth rallies to the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” sung in German. The parallel is deliberate and devastating: Beatlemania and Hitler-mania are, from a child’s perspective, the same phenomenon. Adoration. Belonging. The desperate need to be part of something bigger than yourself.

Jojo’s most trusted advisor is his imaginary friend: Adolf Hitler. Not the real Hitler—a ten-year-old’s fantasy version, played by Waititi himself as a goofy, encouraging buddy who tells Jojo he’s special, cheers him on, and offers terrible advice with infectious confidence. This imaginary Hitler is everything a lonely boy without a father needs: a powerful male figure who never criticizes, never abandons, and always takes Jojo’s side. He is also, of course, a manifestation of everything that is destroying Jojo’s world.

At a Hitler Youth training camp, Jojo fails spectacularly. He can’t bring himself to kill a rabbit—the other boys snap its neck while laughing—and earns the humiliating nickname “Jojo Rabbit.” Trying to redeem himself with a reckless display of bravery, he accidentally detonates a grenade near his own body. He survives, but his face is scarred, his leg damaged, and his brief career as a young Nazi warrior is effectively over. He’s reassigned to desk work under Captain Klenzendorf, a disillusioned officer whose own secret makes him a reluctant protector rather than a committed ideologue.

Then Jojo discovers the girl behind the wall.

His mother, Rosie—vibrant, irreverent, and secretly working with the resistance—has been hiding a seventeen-year-old Jewish girl named Elsa in a crawlspace behind Jojo’s dead sister’s bedroom. When Jojo finds her, everything he has been taught tells him she is a monster. Everything his eyes tell him is that she is a frightened teenager.

What follows is one of cinema’s most original depictions of deprogramming. Jojo cannot simply be told his beliefs are wrong—he’s ten, he’s absorbed them at a cellular level, and the only authority figure telling him otherwise is his mother, whom he now suspects of treason. Instead, his beliefs collapse through exposure. He begins “interviewing” Elsa for a book he’s writing about Jews—asking her about her horns, her mind-reading powers, her nest. Elsa, who is terrified but also sharp and defiant, plays along at first, inventing fantastical answers that Jojo dutifully records. Then, gradually, she starts telling him the truth. Not about Jews—about herself. Her favorite color. The boy she loved. Her fear. Her loneliness.

Jojo’s imaginary Hitler becomes increasingly agitated as the boy’s certainty erodes. The buffoonish buddy grows angrier, more desperate, more recognizable as the historical figure. As Jojo’s beliefs weaken, so does Hitler’s hold on his imagination—because they were always the same thing.

The film’s tonal shifts are its most remarkable achievement and its greatest risk. One moment is slapstick comedy—Rebel Wilson’s Fräulein Rahm cheerfully instructing girls in propaganda techniques. The next is devastating—Jojo walking through the town square and seeing something at eye level that changes his life forever. Waititi trusts his audience to hold both realities simultaneously, just as the characters do. The comedy doesn’t diminish the horror. The horror doesn’t cancel the comedy. They exist together because that is how life works during catastrophe: people laugh, people die, sometimes in the same afternoon.

The film ends in spring. The war is over. The city is in ruins. American soldiers have arrived. Jojo finds Elsa, tells her Germany has won the war to keep her hidden and safe—the first selfless lie of his life. She sees through it. They walk to the front door together, step outside into the light, and begin to dance. David Bowie’s “Heroes” plays. Not the English version—the German version, “Helden.” It’s a ten-year-old boy and a seventeen-year-old girl, dancing awkwardly on the doorstep of a bombed-out house, neither of them with any idea what comes next, both of them alive.

Content Breakdown

Language: One f-word (spoken by a child in a humorous context), several uses of “s–t,” “ass,” “hell,” and “goddamn”—some spoken by children. The word “penis” is used several times. Captain Klenzendorf uses the term “tittie-gropers” while addressing a large group of children. Nazi-era slurs and degrading descriptions of Jewish people are used throughout—these are presented as absurd propaganda, never endorsed. Context: “The language is relatively mild for the subject matter. The anti-Semitic language is the most challenging content—it’s historically accurate and deliberately grotesque, designed to show how propaganda sounds when you actually listen to what it’s saying. The film makes these slurs ridiculous rather than powerful, which is Waititi’s entire strategy.”

Violence: Moderate, with sudden tonal shifts. Children are taught to use guns and throw grenades at a Hitler Youth camp. A boy snaps a rabbit’s neck (briefly shown). Jojo is injured by a grenade explosion—we see aftermath scarring. A knife bounces off a tree and stabs into a child’s leg. War sequences in the final act include soldiers being shot, children armed and sent into battle, and bloody wounds. Dead bodies hang from posts in the town square. A sympathetic character dies suddenly and tragically. The Gestapo searches Jojo’s home in a tense sequence. Context: “The violence is handled with restraint but not dishonesty. The war sequences are chaotic and frightening precisely because children are in the middle of them. The most devastating moment of violence in the film involves no blood at all—just a pair of shoes. Parents should know that this scene will hit hard, and that’s the point. Waititi never lets the audience forget that the comedy is built on top of genuine horror.”

Sexual Content: Minimal. A reference to “tongue kissing” between children. Jojo writes a love letter that is innocent and awkward. No nudity, no sexual situations. The romance between Jojo and Elsa is entirely age-appropriate—a child’s first experience of caring about someone beyond himself. Context: “The romantic element is handled with extraordinary tenderness. Jojo’s feelings for Elsa are confused, innocent, and genuine—he doesn’t fully understand them, which makes them more affecting.”

Substance Use: Imaginary Hitler offers Jojo cigarettes several times (Jojo refuses). Some drinking by adult characters. Context: “The cigarette offers from imaginary Hitler function as a running joke about a child’s idea of what being cool and powerful looks like.”

Mature Themes: Nazi indoctrination of children, anti-Semitism, Holocaust (referenced), war, death of a parent, loss of innocence, propaganda, resistance, hidden identity, orphaning, loneliness, the gap between ideology and reality. Context: “This is a film about how hatred is taught to children and how love can unteach it. Every mature theme serves that central purpose. The depiction of anti-Semitism is extensive but always framed as absurdity—the film takes the actual propaganda that was fed to German children and presents it at face value, allowing the audience to see how insane it sounds. For students in this curriculum who have already studied propaganda and groupthink in earlier objectives, this film provides the emotional experience of watching indoctrination from the inside.”

Why This Film Works for Developing Authentic Happiness and Humor

Jojo Rabbit poses a question that most comedies never attempt: can humor save you from the worst version of yourself?

Jojo begins the film as a zealot. He’s happy in the way that zealots are happy—with the absolute certainty that comes from never questioning anything. His imaginary Hitler keeps him supplied with simple answers, unearned confidence, and the warm glow of belonging to the winning team. This is false happiness. It requires constant maintenance—the suppression of doubt, the dehumanization of outsiders, the refusal to look closely at anything that might complicate the story. It’s the happiness of a closed system.

The film’s comedy operates as the solvent that dissolves this closed system. Waititi doesn’t argue against Nazism—he laughs at it. Not the suffering it caused, but the ideology itself: its absurd claims about racial purity, its cartoonish propaganda, its desperate need to make everything dramatic and heroic. By making Hitler a buffoon, Waititi strips fascism of its most dangerous quality—its glamour. You cannot worship what you’re laughing at.

But the film goes further. It doesn’t just use humor to destroy false beliefs—it uses humor to build genuine connection. The funniest scenes in the film are between Jojo and Elsa, and their humor emerges from the gap between Jojo’s ridiculous expectations and Elsa’s actual humanity. When he asks about her horns and she deadpans that Jews can also read minds and live for two hundred years, she’s doing something radical: she’s using comedy to create a relationship across an ideological chasm. She can’t lecture a ten-year-old out of anti-Semitism. She can make him laugh—and laughter requires seeing the other person as a person.

This is the film’s deepest insight about authentic happiness: it requires the death of certainty. Jojo is never happier than when he is most confused—when his old beliefs no longer work and his new ones haven’t fully formed, when he’s standing in the gap between the world he was taught and the world he’s discovering. The dancing scene at the end isn’t joyful because the war is over or because good has triumphed. It’s joyful because two people who should have been enemies by every measure their society provided have chosen each other instead. That choice—made without certainty, without a plan, without any guarantee—is what authentic happiness looks like.

For sixteen-year-olds, this is essential material. They live in an era of algorithmic certainty, where feeds are curated to reinforce existing beliefs and dissent feels like betrayal. Jojo Rabbit shows what it costs to stay inside the comfortable story—and what it gives you to step outside it. The happiness on the other side isn’t comfortable. It’s awkward, uncertain, and requires dancing with someone you don’t fully understand. But it’s real.

Characters as Individuals

Jojo Betzler is the film’s moral experiment: what happens when a basically good child is raised inside a basically evil system? His fanaticism is never presented as villainy—it’s presented as what childhood looks like when adults fail. Jojo wants to be brave, loyal, and good. His tragedy is that every institution around him has redefined those words to mean something monstrous. His arc is not a conversion—it’s a homecoming. He doesn’t become a different person; he becomes the person he always was underneath the uniform. Watch how Roman Griffin Davis plays the moment when Jojo’s certainty cracks: it’s not an intellectual revelation but a physical one, as if his body understood something before his mind could catch up.

Rosie Betzler is the film’s moral center and Waititi’s tribute to his own mother. She is everything the Nazi state fears: independent, joyful, irreverent, brave, and completely unwilling to let ideology replace love as the organizing principle of her family. She never confronts Jojo’s beliefs directly—she knows that a mother arguing against a child’s heroes will lose. Instead, she models a different way of being. She ties Jojo’s shoes. She dances in the street. She hangs resistance flyers in the town square. She hides a Jewish girl in her walls. Every one of these acts carries the same message: love is not an ideology. It’s a practice. Scarlett Johansson’s performance was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, and Rosie’s sudden absence from the film—conveyed through a detail so small and devastating it takes a moment to register—is among the most emotionally powerful sequences in modern cinema.

Elsa Korr is the person behind the propaganda poster. She is everything Jojo has been told Jewish people are not: frightened, lonely, sharp-witted, defiant, grieving, and completely human. Her strategy with Jojo—playing along with his absurd beliefs while gradually introducing her reality—is a masterclass in how to dismantle prejudice without triggering defensiveness. She doesn’t correct Jojo; she lets him see her. Thomasin McKenzie plays Elsa with a remarkable balance of vulnerability and steel—she’s a seventeen-year-old who has lost her family and depends on the goodwill of a ten-year-old Nazi, and she never lets you forget either the terror of her situation or the courage required to meet it with humor.

Imaginary Adolf Hitler functions as the externalization of Jojo’s indoctrination. Early in the film, he’s silly, supportive, and strangely endearing—because that’s how propaganda feels from the inside. It doesn’t arrive as menace; it arrives as comfort. As Jojo’s beliefs crack, Hitler becomes more aggressive, more recognizable, more desperate. The progression tracks the real psychology of radicalization in reverse: as the person wakes up, the ideology fights harder to maintain its grip. Waititi’s decision to play Hitler as a clown rather than a monster is the film’s boldest choice—it argues that the most effective way to fight fascism is to refuse to be intimidated by it.

Captain Klenzendorf is the film’s most complex adult. A decorated officer reassigned to training children—possibly because of his own hidden identity (the film implies he’s gay)—Klenzendorf performs cynical compliance while quietly protecting those who need it. His final act in the film is one of the most understated heroics in war cinema. Sam Rockwell plays him as a man who has made peace with surviving inside a system he despises, and whose last remaining moral instinct activates at exactly the right moment.

Yorki is Jojo’s best friend and the film’s secret philosopher. A pudgy, cheerful, perpetually bewildered boy who stumbles through Hitler Youth training with zero aptitude and total good humor, Yorki represents what childhood looks like when it isn’t contaminated by ideology. His observations about the war—delivered with the matter-of-fact clarity that only children possess—are among the funniest lines in the film. He is the proof that Jojo’s goodness is not unique; it’s the default. It’s the hatred that has to be installed.

Themes for Deeper Discussion

How hatred is taught:

The film’s most important argument is that anti-Semitism—and by extension all prejudice—is not natural. It’s a curriculum. Jojo has been systematically educated in hatred by teachers, propaganda, peer pressure, and cultural saturation. He’s a straight-A student in a subject that shouldn’t exist.

Discussion questions:

• How does the film show the specific mechanisms by which Jojo was taught to hate Jewish people? What role do teachers, books, peers, and imaginary friends each play?
• Jojo has never met a Jewish person before Elsa. Why is this significant to how propaganda works?
• What modern equivalents exist for the kind of systematic belief-installation Jojo experienced? How does social media function as a propaganda system?
• Waititi has said “Children are not born with hate, they are trained to hate.” Do you agree? What does this imply about responsibility?

Comedy as resistance:

Waititi argues that laughter is the most powerful weapon against totalitarianism—more powerful than argument, more lasting than outrage.

Discussion questions:

• Why does Waititi make Hitler a buffoon rather than a monster? What does this accomplish that a serious portrayal wouldn’t?
• How does Elsa use humor to survive and to connect with Jojo? When does her humor feel like a weapon and when does it feel like a bridge?
• Some critics argued that making a comedy about Nazis trivializes the Holocaust. Others argued it’s in the tradition of Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Mel Brooks. Where do you stand?
• Is there a difference between laughing at the victims of evil and laughing at the perpetrators? Where is the line?

The shoes:

The film’s most devastating moment involves a detail so small it takes a moment to register. Without spoiling the specifics, an everyday object becomes the vehicle for the film’s deepest emotional truth.

Discussion questions:

• Why does Waititi choose to communicate this moment through an object rather than through dialogue or action?
• How does this directorial choice relate to the film’s larger strategy of showing rather than telling?
• Rosie repeatedly ties Jojo’s shoes throughout the film. How does this recurring gesture prepare the audience for what comes later?
• What does this moment teach about how grief actually arrives—not as dramatic revelation but as small, physical recognition?

The door:

The film’s final image is Jojo and Elsa stepping through the front door into the outside world. Throughout the film, doors have separated worlds: the door to Elsa’s hiding space, the door the Gestapo knocks on, the front door Rosie dances in front of.

Discussion questions:

• What does stepping outside represent for Jojo? For Elsa?
• Jojo lies to Elsa, telling her Germany won the war. Why? What kind of lie is this?
• The final dance is awkward—neither of them knows what they’re doing. Why does Waititi choose awkwardness rather than triumph for his ending?
• The film uses David Bowie’s “Heroes” in German (“Helden”). Why this song? What does it mean that the word “heroes” is heard in the language of the defeated nation?

Visual Literacy

Waititi’s Vision

Understanding the director’s choices deepens appreciation:

Color as belief system: The film’s color palette is one of the most deliberate in recent cinema. Nazi Germany is presented in exaggerated, saturated colors—bright reds, bold uniforms, vivid propaganda posters. This is how the regime looks from the inside: glamorous, exciting, aesthetically overwhelming. The colors represent Jojo’s perception, not reality. As his certainty erodes, the palette shifts. By the final act, the city is grey, bombed, stripped of its theatrical color. The only brightness left is organic—Rosie’s clothing, the spring light, Elsa’s face. The visual grammar tracks Jojo’s journey from spectacle to substance.

The butterfly motif: Butterflies appear repeatedly throughout the film—in Rosie’s dialogue, in visual details, in the symbolism of Elsa’s emergence from hiding. The butterfly represents transformation, but also fragility: the thing that emerges from the chrysalis is beautiful and vulnerable. Jojo’s transformation from zealot to human being follows the same pattern. Watch for where butterflies appear and what’s happening in the story at each point.

Beatles to Bowie: The film opens with the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in German, over footage of Hitler-mania that mirrors Beatlemania. It closes with Bowie’s “Heroes” in German, over footage of two children dancing in rubble. The musical bookends trace the film’s argument: blind adoration leads to destruction; genuine connection survives it. The choice of Bowie is significant—Bowie was fascinated by German culture, recorded “Heroes” in Berlin during the Cold War, and the song’s lyrics are about lovers on either side of a wall. Every layer resonates.

Eye-level camera: Waititi keeps his camera at Jojo’s height throughout the film. Adults are shot from below; the world is seen from a ten-year-old’s perspective. This is not just a stylistic choice—it’s an argument. It forces adult viewers to experience the war the way a child does: confusing, frightening, full of information you can’t verify and authorities you can’t challenge. The most important visual moment in the film happens at eye level—something Jojo sees that an adult would see differently because of height. This camera placement makes the audience complicit in Jojo’s confusion and, eventually, his awakening.

The Gestapo sequence: When Captain Deertz of the Gestapo arrives to search Jojo’s house, the film shifts into pure suspense. The comedy drains from the frame. The colors flatten. Stephen Merchant’s towering, sinister presence fills every doorway. This sequence demonstrates Waititi’s tonal mastery—he pulls the audience out of the comedy completely, forces them to feel the terror that existed underneath the satire all along, then releases the tension with Klenzendorf’s intervention. It’s a reminder that the funny version of Nazi Germany and the terrifying version are the same place.

Creative Extensions

The propaganda textbook: Jojo is writing a book about Jews based on Nazi propaganda and his “interviews” with Elsa. Write three entries from this book—one reflecting his early beliefs, one reflecting his growing confusion, and one reflecting what he’s actually learned. How does the tone of the book change as Jojo changes?

Imaginary friends: Jojo’s imaginary Hitler represents the beliefs his culture installed in him. If you had an imaginary friend who represented the beliefs your culture has installed in you—through media, school, social platforms—what would that friend look like? What would they tell you? What would make them angry?

Elsa’s diary: We see the film entirely through Jojo’s eyes. Write a diary entry from Elsa’s perspective for the day she was discovered—a seventeen-year-old’s experience of being found by a ten-year-old Nazi who thinks she has horns. What is she thinking? What is her strategy?

The letter Jojo writes for Elsa: Jojo forges a letter from Elsa’s boyfriend Nathan, not knowing that Nathan is dead. Write the letter Jojo would write at the beginning of the film versus the letter he would write at the end. What changes in what he thinks a Jewish person would want to hear?

Rosie’s shoes: Write a short piece about an everyday object that carries enormous emotional weight—something ordinary that, in the right context, becomes unbearable. Don’t explain the emotion. Let the object do the work.

The comedy debate: Write a short essay arguing either for or against the use of comedy to address the Holocaust. Consider Waititi’s approach alongside Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (1997), and Mel Brooks’s The Producers (1967). Is there a line? Where is it? Who gets to draw it?

Related Viewing

Other films about children in wartime:

• The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2008, PG-13) — A German boy befriends a Jewish boy through a concentration camp fence; ages 13+
• Life is Beautiful (1997, PG-13) — Comedy and tragedy in a concentration camp; ages 12+. Also in this curriculum.
• Empire of the Sun (1987, PG) — Spielberg’s film about a British boy surviving Japanese internment in WWII Shanghai; ages 12+

Other films about indoctrination and deprogramming:

• American History X (1998, R—strong violence, language) — A former neo-Nazi tries to save his younger brother from the same path; ages 17+. Caution: extremely graphic violence.
• The Wave (2008, R) — German film about a teacher who creates a fascist movement in his classroom as an experiment; ages 15+. Also recommended for Objective #26.
• Look Who’s Back (2015, Not Rated) — German satire in which Hitler returns to modern Berlin; ages 16+

Other films that use comedy to address atrocity:

• The Great Dictator (1940, G) — Chaplin’s pioneering Hitler satire, made while the war was still raging; ages 10+
• Dr. Strangelove (1964, PG) — Kubrick’s nuclear war comedy; ages 14+. Also in this curriculum.
• The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014, R—language) — Wes Anderson’s comedy set against rising fascism; ages 14+. Also recommended for this curriculum.

Waititi’s other work:

• Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016, PG-13) — A misfit kid and a grumpy bushman on the run in New Zealand; ages 11+. Shares the same DNA as Jojo Rabbit—a child finding family in unexpected places, with humor as the language of love.
• Boy (2010, Not Rated) — Waititi’s earlier film about a Māori boy whose absent father returns; ages 12+. The autobiographical root of everything in Jojo Rabbit—a child learning to let go of an idealized version of an absent parent.

Recommendation: Essential viewing for students aged 16+. The PG-13 rating is appropriate—the content is handled with care—but the emotional and intellectual demands of the film require the maturity this curriculum has been building toward. Students who have worked through earlier objectives on groupthink (Objective #26), moral courage (Objective #21), and critical thinking (Objective #15) will recognize every mechanism the film depicts. Jojo Rabbit is the rare film that makes you laugh at fascism without ever letting you forget what fascism costs. It argues that authentic happiness—the kind this curriculum’s Objective #27 is designed to cultivate—requires the courage to question the stories you’ve been told, the humor to survive the collapse of certainty, and the willingness to dance with someone you were taught to fear. For homeschooled students especially, this film offers a powerful conversation about the responsibility that comes with being educated outside mainstream systems: the freedom to think differently is a gift, but it must be paired with the humility to keep questioning, even—especially—your own beliefs.