terrible... so disappointed.

good back-story, and good acting

Crappy film

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

I watched this movie when I was really young. It has some powerful magic and beautiful cinematography. Really go and see it if you haven't seen it!

Amy Alden (Anna Paquin) survives a car crash where her mother is killed. She leaves New Zealand to live with her father Thomas (Jeff Daniels) in his ramshackle house in Ontario, Canada. She has no memories of her Canadian home and feels isolated. He's an eccentric inventor artist who flies his homemade glider. Susan Barnes (Dana Delany) is his girlfriend. After a land developer tears down some trees, Amy finds an abandoned nest of goose eggs. She raises the chicks but when the time comes, she has to teach them to fly south.This is a fine family movie. Anna Paquin is adorable and so are the chicks. The story is gentle feel good. Jeff Daniels is great as the eccentric dad. There is a real free feeling that comes from watching people run around with these geese. There is a minor drama with a wildlife officer and a main one with a land developer. In the end, the drama isn't too high but it's good for the whole family.

There is already written a lot about the story of Fly Away Home, so I'm not going to repeat my previous reviewers.I have watched the movie for the first time on German TV in 1998, by chance I zapped into the movie and stayed there, mesmerized, fascinated, enchanted by its magical richness of animal (goose) beauty and lush landscape cinematography. When the film ended, I had a lump of emotion in my throat for several days. Something changed deep inside of me, namely the perception of nature, animals, birds, specifically of wild geese. Something made click inside my mind, and since then I adore geese very deeply. Before the movie, geese were of no special interest to me, oh how ignorant I was! As a matter of fact, my love is so deep and the movie inspires me so much that I want get my own geese.Fly Away home's cinematography and script is performed what I can describe as silent, calm, quiet and serene, but never lengthy; is performed suspense-packed, but never thriller-like. Romantic, but never corny or cliché. Close to life itself and nature, but never overcharged with exaggerated eco-messages. In short, a perfect mixture of all the elements that make a movie worthwhile.The landscape shots are very idyllic (Oscar nomination on this movie for cinematography) and you begin to long and crave for a life on the country-side, away from it all, the boisterous cities and its citizens with their insignificant problems of their everyday lives. When Amy is flying in her ultralight airplane, leading the flock of geese as their surrogate mother, then you can see that the problems on land, down there, are small and trivial. That is where the geese show us how life is meant to be, more simple, more straight-forward, and peaceful. Brilliant.And the film music, the fantastic movie score composed by Mark Isham, transports all the previous mentioned qualities and features in a perfect manner. The introductory song, 10,000 Miles by Mary Chapin Carpenter and co-composed by Mark Isham, is a real tearjerker of the special kind. This song alone summarizes what this movie is all about. Love, friendship, a deep bond among humans and animals, care for nature, peace, freedom and to never give up no matter what. The track expresses Amy's love to her family, and at the same time, the love between Amy and the wild geese. I cannot watch the movie without a package of Kleenex, and I'm male and an adult, a child at heart. I believe everyone has this ability, we just have to show it more often, and this movie can help to release the inner child in all of us.There is no lukewarm love story in Fly Away Home which is a big plus, if at all, it's only presented very subtle and unobtrusive. There have to be more movies like this to prevent a shallow development in our society, but I digress. The main focus of attention is clearly on the geese, who out-act all human actors with feathery ease. Bravo! Please, more movies like this! There are, to my knowledge, only a handful of movies where script, cinematography, directing, music, dialogs and actors come together and are mixed in this perfection.I can only recommend this movie to anyone who still believes in his or her dreams and wants to realize them. This movie supports you there and makes your imaginations soar, literally. As for my part, I'm checking out where I can get geese and how I have to keep them and gain their amazing friendship, deep bond and love. One of the most fascinating movies Hollywood has ever done, Oscar-nominated, and rightly so. Big kudos. Seal of approval: Highly recommended!

This is a review of "Fly Away Home" and "Wind", two films by Carroll Ballard.Loosely speaking, Ballard makes two types of films. Those in which humans tentatively interact with "wild" animals, and those in which man interacts with nature via technology inspired by the natural world. In the first category Ballard's made fare like "The Black Stallion" and "Duma", in the second he's made films like "Wind" and "Fly Away Home". Arguable one of his best films, "Fly Away Home" is about a daughter and father who build an ultralight air-plane that mimics the behaviour of, and acts as a surrogate mother for, a flock of geese. Using the plane, the duo guide the birds to a sanctuary several hundred miles away. It's a touching picture, filled with beautiful scenery, gorgeous aerial footage, sensitive direction and some wonderfully understated acting by Jeff Daniels Anna Paquin.Though his financiers force formulaic plots upon him, Ballard dislikes heavy-handed storytelling, and so tends to keep his characters quiet and muted. With his ethereal visuals, use of silence and love for wind/nature, "Fly Away Home" strongly conjures up the work of Malick and Miyazaki.The film has flaws: some of its rear projection is intrusive, some of its conflicts are a bit clichéd, some of its villains are cartoonish, and aside from the opening and closing song, Ballard's musical score isn't strong enough for such a poetic picture. Still, these flaws are minor and don't intrude on the film's better qualities. While "Fly Away Home" involves an inventor building an air-plane, "Wind" involves a group of mechanical engineers designing a boat. Sounds boring? Both films are more interested in mood and ambiance than they are plot. In "Wind", the design team relocate to a huge hanger at the centre of a vast desert, a world away from the oceans they hope to conquer. We watch as they sculpt away at their boat, Ballard salivating over sleek hulls, tall masts and mighty rudders. Muscles, skeletons, animals, rocks, wind and water are studied and observed, the boat a failure if its body doesn't bend to the will of the waves.Both films deal with men and machines waltzing with nature; our ultralight air-plane is only believable to the geese if they perceive it to be their biological mother, and Ballard's boats fail if they don't slice cleanly through the winds and waves. To resist nature is to compromise the design.Both films were also mildly influential in how they added to our camera vocabulary. "Fly Away Home" gave us some then new three-dimensional camera sweeps and "Wind" offered several cinematic baby steps as well, using specially designed camera mounts for both helicopters and boat hulls, masts etc. "Fly Away Home" is the better of the two films - it's one of the best "family" films of the 1990s - whilst "Wind" is plagued by a bad script, though it does also offer excellent mood and ambiance. You sense that Ballard wants to avoid conventional Hollywood scripts as much as possible, but that they're necessary to provide some semblance of either structure or marketability."Fly Away Home" – 8.5/10 "Wind" – 8/10