Jojo Rabbit
Caging Skies by Christine Leunens
Jojo Rabbit, Taika Waititi’s World War II “anti-hate satire,” takes much of its plot from Christine Leunens’ 2004 novel Caging Skies, in which a young member of the Hitler Youth discovers his parents are hiding a Jewish girl in their home. Although the plot is similar, however, the two differ greatly in tone: While JoJo Rabbit is undeniably comic, Leunens’ novel is much darker than the film. In addition to directing JoJo, Waititi also wrote the adapted screenplay. “What [Taika] does is take even the most serious scene and then suddenly there will be a tonal shift where it’s very funny, but then it can become very serious again,” Leunens said in an interview with SyFy Wire. “It’s like the book and it has the same plot, the same characters, the same themes, but he put his own touches and he put it into another medium so that it works and it’s engaging for an audience.”
