When her mother is killed in a car accident, Amy Alden, a 13-year-old New Zealand girl, moves to Ontario, Canada, to live with her father Thomas, an eccentric sculptor and inventor whom she has not seen for ten years, and his girlfriend Susan. (Amy's journey from New Zealand to Canada seems to have been a detail invented to explain away Anna Paquin's accent. Like Amy, Anna is the daughter of a Canadian father and a mother from New Zealand and spent most of her childhood in the latter country). Amy is a shy, lonely girl who finds it difficult to make friends, but she is interested in nature, and when she finds abandoned Canada goose nest containing sixteen eggs, she brings the eggs home, incubates them and keeps the goslings as pets. A local bureaucratic busybody, however, points out that under Government regulations geese cannot be kept as domestic animals unless their wings have been clipped, a process which Amy finds repellent.
Here in Britain, where they are an introduced species, Canada geese are about as sedentary a species as one could imagine; some of them migrate no further from one side of the lake in the park to the other. (My parents had a pair on the pond in front of their house that seemed to remain there 365 days a year. And those were officially wild birds rather than pets). In their native North America, however, they are highly migratory, making long journeys from their breeding grounds in Canada to their wintering grounds in the American South. Thomas, therefore, decides to use his home-made ultralight aircraft to lead Amy's geese on their annual migration. When he realises that the birds regard Amy as their mother, he teaches her how to fly a microlight of her own so that she can lead them.
That plotline seems absolutely bonkers; I wouldn't allow a teenage daughter of mine to make a flight by microlight of one mile, let alone the several hundred miles from Ontario to North Carolina. "Fly Away Home" is, however, partly based on fact. The character of Thomas is based on Bill Lishman a Canadian sculptor, filmmaker, inventor, naturalist and microlight enthusiast who did indeed make a flight of this nature in an effort (successful, it would appear) to teach a flock of geese how to migrate. The difference is that Lishman did not have a 13-year-old girl flying alongside him; the character of Amy appears to have been invented to increase the film's appeal to the family audience.
I called the plot bonkers, but in some ways the film is magnificently bonkers, celebrating as it does an exploit which seems pointless, even to a keen ornithologist like myself, and yet at the same time exhilaratingly adventurous. Much of the credit must go to Paquin who resists the temptation to play her character as a cute, winsome little girl. Instead Amy emerges as a rather quiet, solemn child, seeming rather younger than her thirteen years, and yet somehow appealing, probably because her love of nature and of her birds is so obviously sincere, not just something feigned in order to impress adults. Paquin is so good that she rather overshadows her adult co-stars, Jeff Daniels, and Dana Delany. The photography of the Canadian landscapes, especially the aerial shots giving us a goose's-eye view, is also impressive. (I say "Canadian" rather than "Canadian and American" because the whole film was shot in Canada, even when the action was supposed to be taking place in the States; Toronto, for example, stood in for Baltimore). Despite the implausibility of the plot (something unlikely to worry younger viewers) "Fly Away Home" makes a very enjoyable family adventure. 7/10.
