Waititi's Adaptation Move: Shrink the Novel to a Child's Eye
Variety's review of “Klara and the Sun” frames Taika Waititi's new film as a repeat of a move that worked once before: taking a solemn, complex, questioning novel and turning it into a cockeyed child's-eye comedy. The precedent the review reaches for is “Jojo Rabbit” — described as a crass, mawkish anti-hate satire about a Hitler Youth member's personal and political awakening — which won Waititi an Oscar and grossed nearly $100 million, in spite of what the reviewer calls its manifold artistic problems. The mechanism is a perspective trick rather than a plot device. Serious material filtered through a narrator who takes the world at face value can be carried without being fully comprehended, which is a way of holding a heavy subject at an angle. It is also, in the reviewer's own language, a style that reads as crass and mawkish when the balance tips — the Oscar and the box office arrive next to the criticism, not instead of it.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
The template is legible: one earnest young narrator, one enormous moral or historical mess, and a tone that keeps the mess at arm's length.
A haul of awards and a big gross don't settle whether the second pass holds up. The critic applying that yardstick already calls the first film crass and mawkish, and the same instincts could read as shtick when repeated.
That's the interesting part: the criticism and the hardware aim at the same qualities — a child's-eye tone blunt enough to make hard material bearable, and blunt enough to annoy.