Taika Waititi Set To Direct ‘Jojo Rabbit’, Star as Imaginary Hitler

Thor: Raganarok came out several months ago, but Taika Waititi is still causing a lot of buzz around Hollywood. The star/ director of What We Do In The Shadows has just announced his next project and he’s taking aim at a character that might be considered a little controversial, Adolf Hitler. In the film, ‘Jojo Rabbit’, he will play Hitler as the imaginary friend to a small child who is dealing with the absence of his father.

Waititi’s Hitler is an imaginary friend to the protagonist, a 10-year-old boy who is desperate to join the dictator’s ranks during World War II. The film won’t include a sympathetic depiction of the actual Adolf Hitler — no surprise there. Rather, the imaginary Hitler in the film will be the invention of a boy who misses his dad, and, confused by Nazi propaganda, imagines a figure who is a combination of his father and the führer.

“It’s my version of… a lonely boy’s best version of his hero, which is really his dad,” Waititi told TheWrap on Wednesday.

Here is the film’s synopsis:
JOJO RABBIT, by Taika Waititi (“Thor: Ragnarok,” “Hunt for the Wilderpeople”), blends his signature humor, pathos, and deeply compelling characters in a World War II satire about a ten-year-old boy who, ridiculed by his peers and misunderstood by his mother, can’t quite figure out how to fit in. As the naïve young German struggles to understand his place in an increasingly Fascist regime, he resorts to an imaginary friend who can offer advice and help him cope.

Source: Thewrap