Headscratchers / Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart

• Jack gets the clock put in him as a baby, but as Jack grows up, it seems the clock grows with him? If it's the same clock he had as a baby, shouldn't it be really small by the time he's 14?
  • Well, Madeleine IS allegedly a witch...
• Did you notice Jack wearing a school uniform before he even started going to the school? Why is that?
• Did anyone else notice that Jack's birth mother looks like Miss Acacia?
  • While similarities persist, they actually look different. The problem is that the style of animation is quite... miniscule. Untrained eyes will see it as the same person... It's like saying cyan is the same colour as blue. They're two separate things, but if untrained...
    • Or we could be talking about a little bit of an Oedipus Complex.
    • It's more on the lines of Like Parent, Like Spouse.
• The movie takes place, years ago, way before modern times, but the circus/fair that Jack and Miss Acacia work at has modern day Halloween decor, for the scary ride. Plus, when Jack goes out for the first time, there's a blonde girl who looks to be wearing modern day clothes?
  • The girl isn't wearing modern clothes. You'd know this if you knew your fashion history. Everything else though? That's what you call Artistic License – History.
• How old is Joe? He's way over age to still be at that school, when Jack was 10, he looks to be at least 18-21 then, and when Jacks turns 14, he's still there? Plus Jack aged over the 4 years but Joe still looked the same?
  • Joe is supposed to be a few years older than Jack. On the note of odd ages, Jack expresses emotions a ten year old shouldn't have... I mean, tearing off a girl's clothes with your teeth. Seems a bit off...
  • Quite a few kids do start to deal with puberty's crazy hormones around that age.
• In that city, in April it snows? Jack was born in April, but people who haven't read about the movie will probably think it's January, and when he accidentally injures Joe's eyes with his clock, it's his birthday (which is in April) and it starts to snow when he goes home running thereafter. Does spring exist there?
  • There are two types of weather in Edinburgh. Cold and colder.
• It's cold enough to snow but the kids are at school in shorts, and not dressed warmly?
  • They make 'em tough up north.
  • People in colder climates can handle cold weather far better than people from warm countries. In addition, Victorian education systems were hardly any good back then... They probably had only one school uniform, meant for all weathers, irrelevant of heat or snow.
  • To quote Douglas Adams:
    There is of course an extremely good reason for wearing shorts when you're young, even in the depths of an English winter [...] According to Wired magazine, we can't expect to see self-repairing fabrics until about the year 2020, but ever since we emerged from whatever trees or swamps we lived in five million years ago, we have had self-repairing knees.
    • I've gone to school in Scotland and can attest to this. Blazers are thin, even in winter. Lowerclassmen have to wear shorts, even in winter. Upperclassmen have to wear trousers, even in summer.
• His heart freezes as a baby from the extreme cold, but his mother's heart isn't frozen, not to mention she isn't dressed warm, either, for somebody out in a snowstorm. Why isn't she cold?
  • If you put a naked woman and a naked baby out in the snow, you can bet your eggs on the baby dying first. Babies are far more sensitive to cold than a full-grown human. That's why death rates used to be very high. The number of dead children between the ages of 0-5 was very, very high.
• At the end, did Jack actually die from the kiss, or because his heart wound down? He and Acacia were about to kiss once before and the clock didn't malfunction then.
• The third act hinges on Joe telling Miss Acacia about Jack's "Three Rules." But how did he know them? It's not like Jack went around advertising them to his school bullies.