Fly Away Home

Fly Away Home was released September 13, 1996, a Columbia Pictures film directed by Carroll Ballard. Anna Paquin plays 13-year-old Amy Alden, whose mother dies in a car crash in New Zealand; she moves to rural Ontario to live with her estranged father Thomas (Jeff Daniels), an eccentric sculptor and inventor. In the marsh near the farm she finds a clutch of abandoned Canada goose eggs, hatches them, and the goslings imprint on her — she becomes their mother, and they follow her everywhere.

But imprinted geese have no parent to teach them a migration route, so Thomas turns his tinkering to the problem: father and daughter fly ultralight aircraft from Ontario to a North Carolina bird sanctuary, leading the flock in formation the whole way. The magical premise is grounded in truth — the film was inspired by Bill Lishman, a real Canadian inventor who began training Canada geese to follow his ultralight in 1986 and led an actual migration in 1993, work that fed into the conservation group Operation Migration.

Caleb Deschanel's cinematography — golden light on water, the flock riding just off the wingtip — earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography. Critics embraced the film (88% on Rotten Tomatoes), but it grossed a modest $25 million domestically and found its true audience later: on VHS, on cable, and on classroom TV carts, where it became one of the late 90s' quiet, beloved animal classics.