Trailer
Plot summary
Thirteen-year-old Amy Alden survives the crash that kills her mother and is brought from New Zealand to Ontario, where her estranged father, Thomas, a sculptor and inventor, lives with his girlfriend Susan. A construction crew tears up a patch of wild land close to the Alden property and Amy comes upon a nest of goose eggs left behind. She hides the eggs in a dresser in the barn, without telling Thomas, Susan or her uncle David. The goslings hatch and take Amy for their mother, and Thomas agrees she may keep them. Glen Seifert, an animal regulation officer, tells the family that geese learn their migration routes from their parents, and that local rules require flightless domestic geese to have their wings clipped. Amy and Thomas therefore plan to guide the birds south themselves, using his ultralight aircraft.
Cast
- Deborah Verginellaas Amy's Mother
- Nora Ballardas Jackie
- Sarena Patonas Laura
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Fly Away Home (1996)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Fly Away Home dramatizes the experiences of Bill Lishman, who in 1986 started training Canada geese to follow his ultralight aircraft and succeeded in leading their migration in 1993 through his program Operation Migration. It also draws on British-born zoologist Dr William J. L. Sladen, who aided Lishman.
- Anna Paquin's character flies an A-frame Cosmos Trike with a mock goose head mounted on the noseplate and a fabric wing covering painted to resemble feathers, features Lishman had wanted to add to his own trike but never did for lack of time.
- At the end of production Lishman led the 60 imprinted actor-geese in migration, to winter at the Tom Yawkey Wildlife Center off the coast of Georgetown, South Carolina.
- In production the film was first titled Flying Wild, changed to Fly Away Home only weeks before it reached cinemas. The original trailer still carries the Flying Wild title on certain VHS copies of Jumanji, and the French title is a translation of it.
- The first production of the investigative theater group The Civilians, Canard, Canard, Goose?, was inspired by rumors of animal mistreatment on the set of Fly Away Home.
