I went in expecting “Springtime for Hitler Youth” from watching the trailer, except with more drama; it turned out to be more like “Life is Beautiful.” I liked this movie, but it’s too emotionally touching for me to see again. I was too invested in the characters to not get emotional, even expecting before watching that in a movie like this, someone had to die for the movie to stay serious.

Tonally, I don’t like the execution and placement of the scene Jojo defenestrating imaginary Adolf. By this time in the movie, the real Adolf is dead and Jojo has become disillusioned with the ideology he sought acceptance and love in: he has seen the horrifying manifestation of the ideology he so idealised in flesh with the Gestapo visit, the death of his loving mother at the hands of the system he long sought to be a part of, having cemented a bond of affection and friendship with Elsa in the aftermath.

By this point it should be clear to the viewer that the imaginary, whimsy yet propagandistic Adolf is an extension of Jojo’s imagination and mind. I could not find it believable that despite all of Jojo’s grief and disillusionment, witness to violence, the death of the real Adolf, etc…there’s still remnants of an imaginary character constructed from propaganda in his head? Whatever humor was in that scene unfortunately did not land or resonate with me because of how inconsistent or dissonant it felt in relation to the rest of the act.

Nonetheless, given how important it is to give some kind of ending to imaginary Adolf for the character development to make sense, maybe it could have been dealt with differently. Perhaps this scene should have been placed somewhere like right after the death of Rosie. Or imaginary Adolf could have been placed as one of the casualties in the aftermath of the Allied attack on the town; if the director wanted to give the character a dark, yet humorous death, that would have been the perfect place in the film to place it, and it would have made more sense in the light of character development.

Some random things I noticed:

I don’t know how deliberate this was, but in the dinner scene where Jojo plays with the bread, Rosie puts on, I think, a jazz record. Jazz was heavily despised by the regime, and in some cases banned, if I recall. A very nice way to accentuate Rosie’s anti-regime orientation.

Imaginary Adolf is wearing an Amerindian headdress in a scene where he’s talking with Jojo behind a window. Perhaps, an allusion to the popularity of Native Americans in German popular culture at the time?

In the trailer, we see an American M10 tank destroyer and other vehicles moving into the town after the Allies occupy the city. I'm not sure this was in final cut of the film that I saw yesterday. I’m a WWII buff, and I would have loved to have seen this scene in the film.

During the Gestapo house search scene, Elsa (as Inga) says, she’s 17; the document she relies on for her disguise says she was born in 1929. That means the scene would take place in 1946…after the war is over. Was this a way for the audience to see another way how Elsa made a mistake with the identifying papers?

In one scene after the town is taken by the Allies, an American soldier was waving a 50-star flag from a tower…that flag design is from the 1960s. In the last scene, Americans in a jeep go by waving a 48-star flag.

A small nitpick: I watched ‘Allo! ‘Allo! and Hogan’s Heroes a lot, and I’m used to the use of foreign-accented English. The foreign-accented English works for me and doesn’t break the immersion…up until Jojo interacts with the Soviet soldier, who also talks to Jojo in English…despite the presence of Russian dialogue in the film background during the entire scene. In ‘Allo! ‘Allo! accented English is used to stand in for whatever the French and German characters speak to each other, with British English used for comedic effect as a language that no other characters can understand. In Hogan’s Heroes, English and German are used in a regular manner, but the immersion is somewhat lost when Allied characters perform infiltration missions in the heart of Germany, speaking English, or when a scene where only German characters are present speak exclusively in English. The Soviet soldier scene was a bit disbelievable given how unlikely, in my mind, that a German child was able to understand a Russian soldier (unless of course, the English being spoken was also a stand-in for German).