I always found it really weird how the author grew up in the GDR, and the story's subtext is very clearly about the Soviet Bloc defeating and holding back the Western-backed Nazis, yet the film always gets interpreted by so-called "critics" as pro-Western capitalism because "muh freedom and capitalist innovation" is the only possible way that westoids are able to conceptualize a fucking children's story about a depressed outcast child reclaiming his dying imagination by hiding out in an attic with a banned book.