September 12–19, 1996

movie shorts

FLY AWAY HOME

recommended

Directed by Carroll Ballard and photographed by Caleb Deschanel (the team who made The Black Stallion), Fly Away Home renders its simple plotline with effectively lyrical imagery. Anna Paquin plays a young girl whose mother is killed in a car accident (a harrowing sequence under the opening credits), then relocated from New Zealand to Ontario to live with her eccentric artist father (Jeff Daniels). When a set of orphaned goslings "imprint'' her as their mother, she and dad teach them to fly south for the winter, using two single-person flying contraptions (which he constructs with a sm all team, including his girlfriend, Dana Delany). With a theme familiar from Born Free and the Free Willys — corporate progress (the decimation of wildlands) versus respect for "nature'' — the film is both predictable and often inspirational. Sound performances by the human cast and lovely images of the geese (trundling as a group after Paquin, flying in for mation, kidnapped and caged by an adversarial wildlife authority) make it all quite moving, in spite of some considerable hoke-overkill factors.

— Cindy Fuchs