Animated flick in which a boy’s defective heart is replaced by a magic clock.

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Jack is born with a heart defect during one of the coldest winters ever seen in Edinburgh. To save him, Madeleine the midwife decides to replace it with a magic clock that will keep him alive as long as he follows three rules: don’t touch the clock’s hands, keep anger in check and never fall in love – or the mechanism will break. But when he meets Miss Acacia, a street singer, the rhythm of his heart is affected, beginning an extraordinary adventure that takes him all the way to Andalusia...

The magic of Jack et la mécanique du cœur works at first sight: eccentric sets, odd characters and screwball details combine to immerse the audience in a world of enchantment, whose black, naïve poetry is reminiscent of The Nightmare Before Christmas. How sad therefore that this rich universe collapses under what is essentially a thin love story. Not even the soundtrack by Mathias Malzieu, the head of the group Dyonisos who adapted his own book for the screen, helps to save this wreck.