Fly Away Home [WS] [Blu-ray]

This touching and beautifully photographed family drama was inspired by the true story of Bill Lishman, an eccentric fellow who found and raised a clutch of Canadian geese (who will instantly bond with the first moving creature they see after hatching). When the geese were sufficiently mature, he used his Ultralight plane to teach them to fly and migrate southward. The film version centers on a troubled 13-year-old girl who is sent to the Canadian wilderness to live with her estranged father following the death of her mother. The deeply distraught Amy finds her father to be a successful conceptual artist and inventor who is so absorbed with his own needs that he pays little to hers. For Amy, a small antidote to her grief comes when she finds a bunch of goose eggs that had heartlessly been removed from their nest by greedy land developers. Amy rescues the eggs and tends them until they hatch. The goslings immediately imprint upon her and start following her everywhere, raucously demanding constant feeding. Her father tolerates Amy's newfound family because he sees it helping her, but as summer becomes fall and the geese reach maturity, he realizes that the birds must migrate southward in order to survive. Unfortunately, flying for geese is a learned art; therefore, her dad decides that the best solution is to build an ultralight plane (shaped like a goose), teach Amy to pilot it, and have her guide the geese southward. Many of the spectacular flight scenes in which the geese fly effortlessly beside the little plane are real.