Jack et la mécanique du coeur (Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart)

Director: Mathias Malzieu, Stéphane Berla

France 2013, 94 Min, English, Spanish, age recommendation: 12 years and up

Never turn the hands and never get mad. And certainly don’t fall in love. Flouting these rules could mean death for little Jack: he was born on the coldest day that Scotland has ever known and because his heart froze to ice on that fateful night, the midwife quickly replaced it with a cuckoo clock. Years later, the unavoidable happens: Jack meets a captivating singer. They sing a love song together and Jack's cuckoo clock heart goes crazy. When he comes round, the beautiful singer has disappeared.
Jack's search for his beloved takes him across Europe until he finds her at last, in a fairground near Seville. She doesn’t recognise him, but this is by no means the end of the story. Co-director Mathias Malzieu created the screenplay from his own novella, and his band Dionysos wrote and performed much of the film’s music. An imaginative, witty and touching love story peopled by quirky, sometimes scary figures which have been beautifully and colourfully animated. The film also pays homage to George Méliès, who was creating some of cinema’s first moving images at the same time that Jack was around.