

Georges helps repair his heart and agrees to join Jack in the search for Miss Acacia. Jack only wants to see Miss Acacia again and eventually meets up with Georges Méliès, a magician attempting to operate an early film camera. Madeleine, believing Jack to be a fugitive, helps him to escape.

During an assault from Joe, the cuckoo of Jack's clock heart gouges Joe's eye, and Jack runs home believing he had murdered Joe. Jealous, the older boy and his gang of students torment Jack for the next four years. After starting school shortly afterward, he also meets Joe, a bully who is in love with Miss Acacia as well. He meets a girl in town named Miss Acacia and becomes infatuated with her. On Jack's tenth birthday, Madeleine repeats the three rules before taking him into town for the first time. Madeleine, incapable of bearing children of her own, raises and loves him as her own. Jack's mother, for reasons known only to her, quickly decides her child would be better raised by Madeleine and departs, leaving Jack. She then advises him of three rules to prevent his untimely death: he must never play with the hands of the clock, lose his temper, or fall in love. The attendant midwife Madeleine saves his life by replacing his heart with a fragile but working cuckoo clock. Due to the extreme cold, he is born with a frozen heart that will not beat. In Edinburgh, Scotland 1874, Jack is born on the coldest day ever. The original French language version, Jack et la mécanique du cœur, which translates literally as Jack and the Mechanic of the Heart, was released in October 2013, with English, German, Finnish, and Spanish-language versions following in 2014. The music of the film was entirely composed by Dionysos. Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart is a 2013 French 3D computer-animated musical fantasy film based on the concept album by the French rock band Dionysos, and on the novel La Mécanique du cœur written by the band's lead singer Mathias Malzieu.
