Love
hurts, yeah, yeah. For young Jack, it can be downright deadly. That is because
his ticker literally ticks. Born on Edinburgh’s coldest day ever, Jack’s heart
was frozen solid and had to be replaced with the titular timepiece. His adopted
mother warns him not to fall in love, lest it overwhelm his cardiac gears, but
fate has other ideas in Mathieu Malzieu & Stéphane Berla’s Jack and the Cuckoo Clock Heart (trailer here), which screens
during the 2014 New York International Children’s Film Festival.
It
takes a certain kind of woman to successfully replace a heart with a cuckoo
clock. Convinced Madeleine, the midwife with a wiccan-ish reputation, will be a
better parent to the boy, his overwhelmed birth mother abandons Jack in her
care. She subsequently drills the rules of cuckoo clock maintenance into his
skull full of mush: don’t touch the hands, don’t lose his temper, and never
ever fall in love. However, he nearly loses it when it first sees Miss Acaia, a
young flamenco singer, performing in the city square.
For
years, Jack must endure the bullying of his romantic rival while separated from
his true beloved. However, when trouble forces him to leave Edinburgh, Jack sets
off in search of Miss Acaia. He is encouraged and accompanied on this quest by
his new friend and heart-tweaker, the tinkering future pioneer of filmmaking, Georges
Méliès. Eventually, they find Miss Acaia performing in Andalucía, which is a
giant carnival in Malzieu’s macabre world, but unfortunately Jack’s nemesis follows
closely behind them.
Based
on the concept album and children’s book by Malzieu, the frontman of the
surrealist rock band Dionysos, Cuckoo is
an odd bird by any objective measure. It is sort of like Hugo reconceived by Edward Gorey, with a dash of The Who’s Tommy mixed in for extra strangeness. Much
like “children’s books for adults” (a category of publishing that probably
applies to Malzieu’s chapter book), the film version is really a child’s
animated parable for adults. Frankly, the film ends on a lyrically poetic note,
but it will not be a crowd-pleaser for younger audiences.
So
who is it for? Maybe fans of Méliès, Gorey, Tod Browning, Tim Burton, Charles
Adams, Jack the Ripper films (yes, he makes a strange appearance), and Les Miz’s Samantha Barks, who provides
Miss Acaia’s voice for the English language soundtrack (and quite nicely so).
You know who you are.
Cuckoo’s computer
generated animation is quite striking and richly detailed, in a darkly ominous way,
and Malzieu’s songs have more substance than one would expect from an animated
film (recent Oscar winners not excluded). Nevertheless, parents should fully
understand this is a fable, not a fairy tale. Malzieu and Berla fully deliver
on their early promise of romantic tragedy.
