Fly Away Home
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Fly Away Home is a 1996 film, directed by Carroll Ballard, about the daughter (Anna Paquin) of a divorced man (Jeff Daniels) who, with her father, leads a flock of geese from Canada to a wildlife refuge in the US.
The film was loosely based on the real-life experiences of Bill Lishman, a Canadian inventor, artist, and ultralight aircraft enthusiast. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Lishman openly wondered if waterfowl could be taught new migration patterns by following low-speed ultralight gliders. In 1993, after several years of logistical and bureaucratic setbacks, Lishman successfully led a flock of Canada Geese on a winter migration from Ontario, Canada to Northern Virginia. Of the sixteen birds that participated in the migration, thirteen returned to Ontario the following year - entirely on their own.
The project was dubbed Operation Migration.
Following the successful experiment with Canada Geese, Lishman turned his efforts towards rare and endangered waterfowl, most notably the whooping crane. As of 2005, Lishman continues to lead waterfowl on annual migratory excursions.
Synopsis
At the beginning of the film (The credits are still running) while riding in a car with her mother, Amy Alden, a young girl between 12 and 14 years old, is in an accident that leaves Amy slightly injured, but unfortunately kills her mother. Her father Thomas Alden comes to New Zealand and brings her back to Canada a month after the accident. Understandably, though not crippled by her grief, Amy is still in shock, and is slow to warm to her father and her new life. It is implied and somewhat stated later in the film that, through the sheer distance between Canada and New Zealand, along with her father's frustration at the failure of his relationship with Amy's mother and reluctance to mentally confront this frustration, Amy and her father have been estranged for the duration of Amy's life. (Amy had left with her mother to live in New Zealand when she was 3 years old)Thomas Alden is an artist, inventor, and possibly, a naturalist. He is also obviously a man of above average or high intelligence as is implied and indicated by several of the complex inventions and works of art and sculpture that lie around his house and property.
Amy, neither encouraged or discouraged by her father, sets off to explore her new surroundings on her own and adjust to her new life, interspersed only by her attendance of school. Early one morning, a crew of construction vehicles comes along and destroys a portion of a nearby nature habitat, including a nesting area for Canadian wild geese. Amy goes out to investigate and finds a cache of eggs that a nesting mother goose was forced to abandon. Amy rescues the eggs and incubates them. When she finally comes to check on the eggs an indeterminate amount of time later (what appears to be only a day in the film) the goslings are hatched, and Amy being the first living thing they see, she is "imprinted" as their mother, and thus they follow her everywhere throughout the remainder of the film.
Thomas consults with a wild game warden about how to feed and care for the ducks, but unwittingly attracts his duty attentive to render parentless migratory birds flightless, citing various dangers and hazards to others and the birds themselves. He is however unsuccessful and consequently driven from the Alden compound. As the geese grow and mature, it becomes obvious to Thomas, Amy, and all their friends that the birds must migrate or they will have to be rendered flightless. Thomas's brother David has an ornithologist acquaintance in the United States who informs him of a plot of land in North Carolina that can be used as a bird sanctuary. There is a catch however: The sanctuary has been largely uninhabited by birds for a long time, and developers have expressed interest in the land. Unless birds are shown to be nesting in the area by November first of that year, the sanctuary will become the property of the developers. David and Thomas agree that the land would be prime for the geese, and Thomas proposes a plan to get the Geese to follow him in a plane and he will fly south using an ultralight slow-moving aircraft, showing them the way to migrate, but inital experiments are unsuccessful until Amy attempts to fly her father's ultralight plane, and the geese take off after her. Thomas then revises his plans and constructs or obtains (it is not entirely clear in the film if he bought the plane or just the parts) a second ultralight craft and trains Amy on how to fly it. All is going according to plan until the night before the planned launch, the Wild Game Warden comes while the Alden family is out, and absconds with the caged geese.
Thomas, his brother, and a mutual friend, Barry, enact a plan to free the geese, and simultaneously launch their plan. The geese are freed, and Thomas and Amy, flying in their planes, get the geese to follow them, flying over Lake Ontario and landing at the U.S. Niagara Air Force Base, narrowly avoiding arrest and other legal consequences. A news crew is alerted, and very quickly, Amy and her father become national news, and on their journey south over the U.S. eastern seaboard , are supported, encouraged, and in one case fed and sheltered, by approving citizens.
It soon comes down to being a matter of time at the bird sanctuary location. A massive crowd of supporters has assembled, retarding the efforts of the developers and the construction crew who want to press their hand pre-emptively and claim the land. Nearly there, a piece of the wing on Thomas's plane breaks and he crash-lands in a corn field. Amy, having progressively warmed to her father, shrieks in terror and lands immediately to come to her father's aid. He is slightly injured and his plane is damaged by the landing, and tells her that if they wait for help, it might be too late. He tells Amy to proceed on without him as they are so close to the destination. He then hitches a ride while Amy flies the last leg of the journey on her own. Thomas arrives at the sanctuary before Amy and requests the crowd to quiet down so they can listen for Amy and her plane, and after a short amount of time, Amy's plane and the geese appear over a hillcrest and are greeted enthusiastically by the crowd when she lands. The credits soon begin rolling, but additional footage plays in the background, showing the geese' return to the Alden farm.
Quotes from the film
- I'm not stopping this construction site for a bunch of ducks... geese.... whatever.
External links
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