Small desobediences in “Jojo Rabbit”

Small desobediBetween childhoods, dances and unlikely friendships

Abstract

This article is produced in the encounter between cinema, childhood, disobedient gestures and emotions, making it possible to think about children's ways of existence and resistance. With the movie “Jojo Rabbit” (2019), directed by Taika Waititi, we experience a childhood that escapes the temporality of the life cycle and the docility of bodies, rehearsing small revolts. The story, set at the end of World War II, has Johannes Betzler, a ten-year-old boy, as the protagonist. Betzler's life project is to become a soldier and defend his homeland on the Nazi fronts. His project, however, is interrupted when he suffers a serious accident in his military training and also by the discovery that Rosie, his mother, hides Elsa, a Jewish girl, inside her own house. Are the boy soldier's encounters with Rosie and Elsa capable of affecting and destabilizing his certainties about the Nazi-fascist regime? Could the dances experienced by the characters and an unlikely friendship between a little German and a Jewish teenager forge life movements beyond the pain, death and hopelessness of a war and its grammar of destruction? For the production of data, we were inspired by screen ethnocartography and its proposal of inventing worlds in long and immersive contacts with the field-screen, exercising an attentional fluctuation with the recording of experiences in a field notebook. When analyzing the scenes, dialogues, sequences and framings of the film, articulating them to the theoretical references of the research, we observed the experimentation of other forms of life, allied to the forces of difference and metamorphosis, in an abandonment of the characters that made it possible to escape Nazi prescriptions, surpassing the lived.