Fly Away Home (aka Your House Is On Fire And Your Children Are Gone)

I've touched on this a few times in the past, but Hollywood doesn't make animal pictures the way it used to, not least because nowadays it barely seems to make animal pictures at all (real animals, not CGI monstrosities). When I was growing up, live action family films about overbearing St Bernards, demonic mice and romantic affairs between dolphins and terriers were a ubiquitous part of the multiplex experience. And true, few of these films were what you'd call prestige projects, with "animal flick" typically being code for undemanding kiddy fare (for every Babe, there were at least three Gordys), but every now and then you'd get a feature that conveyed a genuine fascination and affection for the animal in question. Fly Away Home, released in September 1996, is one such film, the subject in focus being Canada geese and their magnificent migratory techniques. It was directed by Carroll Ballard, whose previous directorial credits included two really outstanding animal features, The Black Stallion (1979) and Never Cry Wolf (1983), and he applies the same elegance and sophistication to this story about a flock of hand-reared geese finding their wings. It's another film from my childhood that I feel doesn't get anything close to the recognition it deserves. It sounds, on the surface, like a self-consciously quirky children's story that has to cling to its "but it really happened...kind of" testimonial for any guise of credibility. In other words, it could have gone the way of Andre (1994), one of the weaker animal pictures of the era. Fly Away Home, though, is a surprisingly hard-hitting experience. The film is pervaded by a strong sense of sadness and vulnerability, starting from the opening sequence, which shows a car crash from the perspective of its occupants to the sounds of Mary Chapin Carpenter. After a quieter middle, in which the characters lick and mull over their largely unspoken wounds, it builds to a transcendent third act where we experience the world from a birds' eye. I can't think of another picture, certainly from this ilk, that quite captures the thrill and the poignancy of personal growth and discovery with such dazzling use of perspective. I was fortunate enough to catch it in is theatrical run and there's a part of me that's always been a little haunted by it ever since. 2021 marks the film's 25th year, and it was always on my agenda to pay tribute to it. I probably would have waited until closer to the anniversary date itself, but it was such a good fit for the Home Sweet Home Blogathon being hosted by Realweegiemidget and Taking Up Room that it wound up being bumped to the front of the queue.

The plucky heroine of Fly Away Home is Amy Alden (Anna Paquin) a young adolescent whose contented existence with her mother (Deborah Verginella) in Auckland, New Zealand comes to an abrupt close when the two are involved in a road accident that only Amy survives. Amy is relocated to Ontario, Canada to live with her estranged father Thomas (Jeff Daniels), an eccentric sculptor who dabbles in aviation on the side. Amy initially struggles to readjust to her new environment, and to the notion of life having to resume some form of normality following her traumatic experience; she's resistant to the idea of attending school in Ontario, or of the prospective new family unit offered by Thomas's partner Susan (Dana Delany) and his brother David (Terry Kinney). Amy finds renewed motivation when she rescues a clutch of abandoned Canada goose eggs from the wreckage of a partially-bulldozed wilderness (pending development on which is the subject of great contention among the local community) and creates a family unit of her own by hatching sixteen goslings. The goslings dutifully follow Amy everywhere she goes, thanks to the phenomenon of filial imprinting, by which baby birds accept whatever being is waiting to greet them in their newly-hatched state as their mother. This creates a quandary when the time comes for her brood to fly south for the winter, for geese learn where to go by following their parents; otherwise, they end up all over the place and become a public nuisance, something local wildlife warden Glen Seifert (Jeremy Ratchford) is at pains to point out. When Seifert's proposed solution to pinion the birds doesn't go down well with Amy, Thomas devises a bold, potentially injudicious alternative; he'll build a custom ultralight aircraft for Amy and she can personally show them the route from Ontario to North Carolina. It's a solution which, finally, gives Thomas and Amy the opportunity to unite over a common goal...provided Amy doesn't break her neck en route, of course.

It was this aspect of the picture that raised some eyebrows among viewers, not least because, at the time of release, it had the misfortune of being overshadowed by a real-life tragedy. Contemporary critics, while largely enthusiastic about the film, noted that Amy's story bore an ominous resemblance to that of Jessica Dubroff, a seven-year-old girl who was killed only a few months prior while attempting a record-breaking flight across the United States with her father (media pressure to meet deadlines is deemed to have played a part in Dubroff's death, and perhaps this gave the portions of Fly Away Home where the media gets behind Amy's cause an unintentionally dark undertone back in 1996). On the film's DVD commentary, Ballard himself acknowledges that, of course, no parent in real life would expose their child to the level of risk that Thomas does Amy. But then to get too hung up on this point would be to subscribe to too literal a reading of the scenario, which is, in the end, best understood as a metaphor.

Fly Away Home is based on a true story, although the character of Amy is entirely fictitious. Thomas has a real-life equivalent in Bill Lishman, a Canadian sculptor and naturalist famed for his studies on imprinting and bird migration. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, Lishman conducted a number of experiments in getting imprinted geese to follow him in an ultralight aircraft, efforts that were depicted in the 1990 PBS documentary C'mon Geese. In 1993, Lishman was able to lead his geese on a successful migration, before expanding his attentions to whooping cranes and founding Operation Migration, a project dedicated to establishing a migratory route for the cranes between Wisconsin and Florida. Watching C'mon Geese, there is something incredibly, beautifully cinematic about the footage of Lishman taking flight with his geese, so it's hardly surprising that Hollywood wanted to utilise a piece of that magic to their own ends. The challenge came in dramatising Lishman's work in a narrative better suited to the needs of conventional storytelling. Hence the introduction of a younger protagonist, so that the visual splendour of the goose migration serves as an analogue to a coming of age story, in which Amy navigates her way both from childhood toward adulthood, and from loss to recovery.

 C'mon Geese (1990)

Fly Away Home formed part of a spate of pictures from the mid-1990s focusing on unlikely connections between troubled children and imperilled wildlife, the template for which was provided by the 1993 hit Free Willy. Here, the plight of the titular whale, abducted from the wild and held captive in a tiny pool in an amusement park, is echoed in the domestic trials of young hero Jesse (Jason James Ritchter), a juvenile delinquent struggling to come to terms with his mother's abandoning him, and to life with his long-suffering foster parents (Jayne Atkinson and Michael Madsen). The unruly child and disobedient whale bond, it's implied, through an intuitive sense of mutual displacement. At the end of the film, when Willy is returned to the ocean, so too has Jesse been restored to his own rightful place - not with his biological mother, as he had long hoped, but with his foster parents, whom Jesse now accepts as having filled the void left by his mother. The final line of the film, spoken by Jesse's adoptive parents, is "Let's go home", reinforcing the idea that Jesse's reinstatement to a family unit has been the end-goal of our journey all along. His acceptance of his foster parents, meanwhile, demonstrates that he has embraced change over a regression into the reassurances of childhood and is on route to becoming an adult, with his ability to part ways with his beloved whale signifying the final stage of his progression from alienated street kid to confident and responsible young man (albeit one rebellious enough to bust an orca from an aquarium). Therein lay the paradox of such pictures - they thrived on the charm and the spectacle of their human-animal interactions, yet the ultimate signifier of the child's growth typically came in their recognition that the animal was better off with its own kind in the wild. It was definitely a more sensitive rite of passage than that of old school Disney kid-and-their-animal pics like The Yearling (1946) and Old Yeller (1957), where the protagonist would demonstrate their emerging maturity by killing their four-legged companion, not least because it pointed to a world where humans and animals could co-exist, if not necessarily in close proximity. Other films within this category included the aforementioned Andre, Born To Be Wild (1995), Alaska (1996) and, in a handy intersection of the decade's eco-sensitivity and nostalgia for mid-century television, a cinematic reboot of Flipper (1996). To say nothing of the sequels and TV spin-off spawned by Free Willy (conveniently, Willy and Jesse had a habit of bumping into one another). It (1990) director Tommy Lee Wallace even tried his hand at the genre on the small screen, with a kinda-sorta sequel to the 1966 classic Born Free, Born Free: A New Adventure (1996). In this regard, Fly Away Home might be regarded as something of a formula picture. The basic elements are certainly all there - an alienated young protagonist from a broken or troubled home, a dislocated animal who provides the opportunity for healing and, above all, an emphasis on the need of the animal in question to remain wild and free, through which it doubled as a sort of totem to the newly-liberated spirits of its human cohorts. David Ingram, in Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema, likewise identifies Daniels' character as part of "a trend towards a more sensitive, less brutally macho type" of male hero in environmentalist pictures, while acknowledging that this often served as "an ideological ruse" to convey more conservative messages about the ascendancy of patriarchal power. (p.38) I suppose you can accuse Fly Away Home of both adhering to and inverting that trend. On the one hand, it centres heavily on a withdrawn father rediscovering and embracing his patriarchal prowess, after his erstwhile slackness on the matter caused his family to disintegrate. But it also diverges from tradition as it nears its conclusion, in suggesting that it is qualities gained more implicitly from her mother's influence that have enabled Amy to get as far as she has.

There is an eco-friendly message regarding the encroachment of human development on wild habitat, although in practice this exists primarily as a device to drive the narrative at two distinctive points. The initial threat comes from preliminary efforts to clear the local marshlands, which leads to the eggs being abandoned, and provides a couple of early scenes in which Thomas makes a stand for the surrounding wilderness, but as a narrative thread basically fizzles once it has fulfilled its purpose (although the lack of definitive resolution may well be the point). Later, we learn that the wildlife preserve in North Carolina where Thomas and Amy intend to lead the geese is also under threat from developers, and will be bulldozed if the geese do not arrive by a specified date. This turns Amy's climactic quest into a race against the clock, which is all well and good from a dramatic perspective, but also the point at which the narrative feels most conspicuously determined by the conventions of Hollywood formula. The suggestion that the geese may eventually end up with nowhere to fly to or from provides a slick thematic parallel with Amy's own displacement, and illustrates the omnipresence of the problem, but the final conflict ends up feeling rather arbitrary, with Ken James' developer becoming something of a stock antagonist, with too little presence or development to have much impact as a character. More effective in the villain seat is Ratchford as Seifert; he provides the film with yet another obligatory Hollywood beat when he abducts and impounds the geese on the night before take-off, forcing Amy and her family to pull off an adrenalin-baiting jailbreak the following morning. He also has minimal presence throughout the film, but in what little screen time he has conveys an unctuous, understated menace, which bubbles queasily to the surface through his wielding, of all mundanities, a pair of nail clippers.

What enables Fly Away Home to excel above most other pictures of its ilk is the cinematography, which is spectacular. The low-key performances, moody direction and endearing goslings are certainly enough to keep us engaged for the first two thirds of the narrative. But when Amy climbs aboard her custom aircraft and jets off for North Carolina, the picture really takes flight (pun intended) and becomes something else entirely. The succession of aerial images showcasing the North American landscape from above are an experience unto themselves - exhilarating, awe-inspiring, haunting and poetic. The excitement of the flight sequences, and the imagery of the formation of geese flying alongside Amy's aircraft capture the splendour and astoundment of Lishman's true-life experiments, but they are also a powerful illustration of the participants' own progression as characters. Appropriately, the narrative structure mirrors that of the geese's natural development - down-to-earth and unassuming for the first two acts, before taking to the air and realising its true potential. The dramatic new perspective speaks of Amy and Thomas's desire to rise above the pain that has weighed them down, and make their way to a better, more hopeful state of being. Which, of course, is the real purpose of the journey we're on. Not that the film doesn't convey a tremendous passion for the beauty of airborne avians, but it is clearly the underlying domestic drama that's driving this formation.

In part because of the sheer number of them, we don't get to relate to the geese as characters as we do Willy, Flipper and Elsa. In general, the film avoids anthropomorphism (the scene where Amy gets one of the geese to fly by berating it via radio is about the furthest it veers in that direction) and while there's an inevitably high adorability factor to the footage of them as ickle goslings, has little interest in coaxing AFV-style pet tricks from them (aside from one moment where a gosling loses its balance atop a toilet seat). Although Amy gives each of the geese a name and knows them all as individuals, only one goose, Igor, is given distinguishing characteristics from the viewer's perspective. Born with a limp, he lags behind his siblings and makes a reluctant flyer, eventually getting himself injured and necessitating that he make the journey strapped to the back of the aircraft. (Igor apparently existed and was injured in real life when Lisham landed his aircraft on top on him.) Igor plays an important role in ensuring that we maintain some sense of personal familiarity with the geese (particularly as they mature and their cuddliness inevitably wanes), but otherwise the geese exist largely as symbols, the beauty and majesty in their taking flight serving as additional manifestations of Amy and Thomas's newfound liberation, with their occasional skewing toward danger (such as when they become side-tracked by a flock of wild geese and fly frighteningly close to a group of hunters) signifying the risks and challenges that come with taking any bold leap. To fly is, of course, to put oneself in grave danger. This is the paradox facing Thomas, who understands that his means of redeeming his bond with his daughter also has the potential to go horribly wrong. (This is something that Thomas deliberates on, and his rationale, when challenged by Susan - that one is safer in the air than on a highway - doesn't exactly put our anxieties to rest, for the reasons cited by Roger Ebert: "I think the statistics he's thinking of apply to scheduled commercial airlines, not to planes that come in a box and you put them together yourself.") When viewed in a less literal sense, however, we might comprehend Thomas's willingness to allow his daughter to pilot her own aircraft as an acceptance of the risks that must be taken in enabling her to go forth and develop into her own person. We see shades of this in an earlier sequence where Amy objects (with the ferocity of an actual mother goose) to Seifert's attempts to clip her goslings' wings, and is not won over by his insistence that pinioning is for the good of the goose. Keeping the geese grounded would enable them to remain in her care forever but, as signified in the grotesqueness with which the act of pinioning is here represented (as Ballard acknowledges on the DVD commentary, it's made all the worse for being carried out with something as mundane as nail clippers), it amounts to breaking the spirit of the goose, denying them the opportunity to develop into the creatures they are destined to be. Amy gets to dwell more consciously on the difficulty of letting her adopted offspring go their own way, when she suggests that they combat the geese's instincts by keeping them in the barn during the winter, which Thomas points out would be little different to clipping their wings. The urge to fly will come regardless. This also applies to people and their metaphorical clipped or unclipped wings.

The film's working title was Flying Wild, and this title stuck for long enough to be featured in early trailers and promotional material (if you own a copy of the original US VHS release of Jumanji, for example, you can glimpse the Flying Wild trailer there). "Fly Away Home", though, feels like a better fit in terms of the film's central themes and its more implicit narrative, which concerns Amy's odyssey to recover her sense of personal belonging. It recalls a popular nursery rhyme - albeit one about insects, not birds - evoking imagery of domestic disruption, childhood vulnerability and parental absence: "Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home/your house is on fire and your children are gone." The burning house in the rhyme might be linked to the threatened marshlands favoured by the geese, to Amy's fractured psyche and to the familial discord between Amy and Thomas. The reference to absent (or dead) children suggests the estrangement that existed between Amy and Thomas for years, and Amy's lingering alienation. The ladybird, meanwhile, evokes both the robust maternal urges of Amy toward her adopted brood, or a call to arms to Thomas to step up and take charge of the daughter he has ignored for so long.

We never learn exactly what caused the relationship between Amy's mother and father to break down, a question that has long haunted Amy. The best explanation is that they were driven in fundamentally different directions - Amy had heard from her mother that they were both artists, and artists tend by nature to be selfish. There are two items in Thomas's barn that appear to symbolise the turmoils of the family's past - a tire swing, which Amy can vaguely recall being pushed in by her mother at age 3, and the large and imposing model that overlooks it, a life-sized replica of the lunar lander module. The tire swing, which provides Amy with a hazy connection to a time when her family were together, symbolises a lost innocence, but her attachment to it is double-edged. When the present-day Amy is seen swinging upon it, she does so with a dissatisfied vigour that is indicative of her frustration and desire to outgrow her disrupted childhood and take flight (literally and metaphorically). The lunar lander, while it is the crowing achievement of Thomas's work as a sculptor and has attracted a number of lucrative offers from prospective buyers, is the haunting embodiment of the family's estrangement. Probably not coincidentally, Thomas was compelled to build the ridiculous artefact around the time that Amy and her mother left, his rationale being that, "They left [the original] there. It's parked. So we needed another one. So I made an exact replica." We sense that the passion and energy Thomas poured into this project was redirected from the energy he was unable or unwilling to put into salvaging his relationship with his wife and daughter, but it also stands as a testament to his desire to make himself unreachable in the aftermath. Toward the end of the film, when Amy asks Thomas why he never came to visit her as a child, he tells her that New Zealand is a long way from Canada, which she retorts is a lame excuse. But then to Thomas, being parked on the moon and being situated on the other side of the Pacific ocean amounted to much the same thing. He found the gulf of the separation, physical and emotional, unendurable, and in lieu of attempting to repair those broken bridges, he wrote them off as gone and immersed himself in a substitute in the form of his work. He maintains his emotional wall even when Amy re-enters his care, ensuring that she's fed and attends school but generally keeping himself to himself in his shop and leaving Amy to amble around the property by her lonesome. When Thomas resolves to assist Amy in flying her geese to North Carolina, he finances his new project by selling the lunar lander, a sign that he is finally starting to emerge from his own proverbial shell and assume responsibility for Amy, not merely as a caregiver but in actively repairing the wreckage created by her upheaval and their decade of estrangement.

The implicit narrative of Fly Away Home deals with Amy's quest to find her own way home, the home in question being a metaphorical one pertaining to identity and affinity. The life she knew with her mother is now gone, the life she once had with her father is only a faded memory; where is she to roost in the present when she has nothing solid to which to hold? But there is another dimension to this implicit narrative, regarding Thomas's own quest for redemption. It is hard to miss the parallel between the gosling's predicament and Amy's, signposted particularly prominently in Seifert's warning that, "Without parental influence they'll get the urge to fly but won't know where they're going." (For as unsettling as he is, Seifert provides us with a heck of a lot of invaluable exposition.) He's talking about the geese, but his words are also evocative of Amy's estrangement, and how the respective absences of both her mother and her father has left her emotionally adrift. Thus, when Thomas leads Amy and the geese on their daring journey across North America, he is actually showing her the way, not simply to North Carolina, but out of her grief and despondency toward a renewed sense of purpose and connection, much as a goose would teach its offspring how to thrive in a turbulent world. Thomas's aviator callsign is "Papa goose", and it seems that he is indeed entirely worthy of his title. Amy, naturally, answers to the callsign "Mama goose", which is indicative her role as surrogate mother to sixteen anserine devotees, and much more.

Home for Amy ultimately represents a purer state where she is able to maintain a firm connection to both her mother and father. This is not equivalent to the innocence represented in the tire swing, something that belongs to an altogether different time, when Amy was small and her family was still physically united. Instead, Amy finds her new emotional pillar through her repaired bond with her father, and a renewed sense of her mother's continued presence in her life. As much as the flight has pivoted on the bond between Amy and Thomas, in the end it proves to be the figurative recovery of Amy's mother that enables her to complete her journey. Things go awry toward the end when Thomas's plane crashes, leaving him stranded in a field with a dislocated shoulder, and he tells Amy that she must complete the last leg of the journey alone. Amy panics, believing that she cannot find her way without her father, but Thomas assures her that she won't be without parental influence - her mother will be guiding her. This takes us into the only point in the narrative in which Amy explicitly ruminates on her feelings of bereavement, and Thomas finally assists her with coming to terms with her loss. The understanding of death as being followed by renewal, with each new generation carrying the anima of the old (literally or metaphorically), is evoked when Thomas tells Amy that her mother is in the geese she has nurtured, and also when he calls to mind the extent that Amy has become her mother's successor: "She was brave...she went off, followed her dream. Nobody helped her. You have that strength in you too." Although the journey has largely functioned as a means of re-establishing the bond between father and daughter, and reaffirming Thomas's role as the leader of the family he had once allowed to go stray, it ultimately serves a very different purpose, in enabling Amy to take her first steps toward womanhood and discover her own independent ability to pilot her way through hardship, thanks to the knowledge and attributes she has gained from each of her parents.

Fly Away Home concludes with a sequence depicting the geese splashing animatedly around their new grounds in North Carolina while bathed in a golden sunlight that evokes both the triumphant preservation of their intrinsically wild, unbound nature, and a sense of optimism regarding the future of their territory, which Amy has not only led them to but also secured for them through her efforts. As with Free Willy, the film ends with a stealthy reminder as to whose journey we have really been following, by settling on a freeze frame of Amy and Thomas, the former's head rested upon on the latter's shoulder, proof that their bond has been restored and that Amy now has a secure bedrock from which to define herself going forward. There is, however, a non-dialogue epilogue that plays over the closing credits, in which Amy, now back at her father's house in Ontario, awakens one morning the following spring to find that her geese are returning. This was the dual victory of Lishman's endeavors - once the geese had been shown the migratory route, they were able to make the journey back on their own, which in the context of Amy's story, serves as an additional affirmation of her newfound independence (Thomas, notably, is absent from this sequence). More significantly still, we close the picture with another cycle renewing itself in the form of a joyful reunion, which is evocative of something lost being recovered. The epilogue is thus indicative not only of Amy's success as a mother goose, but also of her own mother's symbolic return. Throughout the film, we catch only fleeting glimpses of Amy's mother - she appears briefly in the title sequence, after which she exists only hazily, in snippets of memories, photographs on walls and in Amy's attempts, in one scene, to recreate her by dressing in her clothing. But she has such a haunting, underlying presence through what goes largely unexpressed that we sense that this has been the real end-goal of Amy's journey all along - to locate and preserve her mother by giving her some form of tangibility in the present. It seems only appropriate for her free-spirited mother to have the last word, albeit in the form of sixteen Canada geese, as Thomas had promised us she would.