Taika Waititi was inspired to write and direct Jojo Rabbit after reading Christine Leunens' Caging Skies. Although he veered significantly from Leunens' original novel, Waititi felt that maintaining the tone of its first half was important, and took much of his inspiration from the novel. He cast himself as Jojo's 10-year-old imagining of Hitler, a choice which had to do with boosting the farcical nature of the film's depiction of such a universally hated figure. In an interview with NPR, Waititi said, "If we had cast a big-time celebrity person, I think the whole focus from what the film was actually about, which is this beautiful story between these two kids set in a time of darkness, it would have been overshadowed by the idea of this big celeb playing Hitler."
Waititi wrote the film in 2011 and began shooting it in 2017, and defended his choice to make his film a comedy by citing the ways that comedians like Charlie Chaplin did the same in The Great Dictator. Even though he faced a great deal of criticism for the fact that the film makes Nazis seem, in certain ways, harmless and ridiculous, Waititi insisted that this was not the case, and that the satire serves to poke fun at the bullies of history.
His film polarized critics, some of whom thought he was being too glib with his material. Others contended that the bold and irreverent approach he took served to illuminate some of the contradictions of hate, its ultimate flimsiness. In his review of the film, Peter Travers wrote for Rolling Stone, "Waititi’s faith in the notion that a child will lead us out of ignorance may be naïve. It’s also deeply affecting. Besides, isn’t truth always the first casualty of indoctrination, whether you live in the era of fake news or not? The first words of the Leunens novel come to mind: 'The great danger of lying is not that lies are untruths, and thus unreal, but that they become real in other people’s minds.'"
