Cheap Fly Away Home (Special Edition) (DVD) (Jeff Daniels, Anna Paquin) (Carroll Ballard) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of Fly Away Home (Special Edition)

Fly Away Home is based on a true story, and let's face it, audiences love true stories. From Finding Fish to Catch Me if You Can to The Pianist, real sells. And why not? It's familiar, it's heartfelt and it's touching, as is the case of Fly Away Home.

The story is that of orphaned Amy's attempt to live with her father, and raise a flock of geese. She eventually teaches them to migrate. Anna Pacquin is stunning as Amy and Jeff Daniels displays surprising skills as her estranged yet caring father. The relationship between the two of them and Amy and the geese is hauntingly beautiful and so vivrant on screen. Mark Isham provides a sweeping soundtrack that will resonate in your mind for days. It's a shame Columbia never released the CD, but the DVD contains an option for the full score.

As well as the score, the Special Edition DVD contains enough features to hold your attention for hours. Documentaries, commentaries, featurettes, trailers and production notes bring together a fitting package for a captivating film.

Great Family Movie with Stunning Cinematography
This film has much of what perfect family films should have. Anna Paquin gives a quietly perfect performance as a girl whose mother has died, leaving her to go live with her estranged, and somewhat strange, father. Jeff Daniels plays the free-spirit, gruff, eccentric, semi-recluse inventor who is Anna's father. The awkwardness upon her arrival is almost tangible. What saves her, and the father-daughter relationship, is an orphaned family of Canada geese. Anna's character finds them in a patch of woods being developed into a subdivision or commercial complex, they imprint on her (Conrad Lorenz, the ethologist who figured out imprinting, would love this movie), and she has to teach the goslings how to be geese.

The lessons go well until Fall, when it's time for the young but full-grown geese to start thinking about migrating. How does a pre-teen girl teach young geese how to fly? She gets her eccentric inventor of a father to . . . well, I won't give everything away. Let's just say that this story has its ups and downs, but has a happy, but realistic ending. In the meantime, the process of teaching the geese to fly in the film leads to some incredible cinemagraphic sequences. The viewers get a bird's-eye view of geese flying, and feels as if the geese are right next to them.

Is this a complex, mulit-layed film full of sophistication and sub-plots? No way! This is a straightforward film about bonding and love - father-daughter bonding and love, as well as human-animal bonding and and love. "Fly Away Home" is a great movie to have at home and pull out on a rainy day to watch with your kids, from about age four up.

This movie makes my dad cry
And it's not just him. This movie came up amongst my friends in college and every female in the room said that their father KEPT watching this movie and they ALWAYS cried. Sort of brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "empty nest."

This movie is about Anna, who, after her mother's death in a car crash (Anna was also in the car), is sent to live with her slightly eccentric inventor father in Canada. He means well, but he just makes absolutely no sense to Anna. It is an exagerated case of "my dad is so weird" that any teenager can identify with. Meanwhile, the idea of a teenage girl is so foreign to her dad that the more he tries to bond, the more she stomps away.

Into the story comes a band of orphaned Canadian geese that Anna nurtures. They imprint her as their mother, so she more or less trains them. The only problem is that they must fly south for the winter, and Anna is their only role model. Luckily, she has a dad who builds space shuttles for fun. Suddenly, he has a way to connect with her and she has a reason to trust him.

Though it sounds sort of hokey, this movie that never delves into complete pathos. Instead, it is frequently quite funny and always touching. If you are looking for a father's day present, this is ideal. Just make sure to keep some tissues handy.