‘Fly Away’ Takes Wing With Geese

First came the horse. Then the wolf. And now the geese. When director Carroll Ballard makes a strong connection with the animal kingdom, a special kind of film results.

Ballard, whose previous credits include “The Black Stallion” and “Never Cry Wolf,” knows how to be both caring and restrained, minimizing a movie’s saccharine content while maximizing the sense of wonder. His newest, “Fly Away Home,” is a pleasant and high-spirited affair, one of the rare films that manages to be irresistible without resorting to emotional blackmail.

Like those previous Ballard pictures, “Fly Away Home” features characters intent on impossible tasks. For father Thomas Alden (Jeff Daniels) and his estranged 13-year-old daughter Amy (Anna Paquin), the problems are twofold.

Thrown together at Thomas’ southern Ontario farm by a family tragedy after a decade apart, father and daughter have so little in common that the forging of any kind of relationship seems out of the question.

A Gyro Gearlose-type of eccentric inventor-sculptor with a chaotic lifestyle and hobbies like early-morning hang gliding, Thomas is not ideal father material. This kind of straight-arrow-with-a-twist role has become second nature to Daniels, who lends conviction and believability to the part.

After her Oscar-winning role in “The Piano” and her turn in “Jane Eyre,” it’s also no surprise to see Anna Paquin artfully playing a prickly, forthright young woman, suspicious of her father’s new girlfriend (Dana Delany) and having a hard time shaking the air of watchful sadness that clings to her.

Enter the geese. Thomas’ land is near a breeding ground for Canada geese, and when rampaging developers tear up the area, Amy rescues an abandoned nest of eggs. She takes it home, keeps a careful watch and widens her eyes in appropriate astonishment as 16 tiny beaks break through their shells and come out to play.

In truth there is no resisting these fluffy individuals, either as fuzzballs or when they get older and, viewing Amy as their mother, impetuously follow her everywhere in response to her chirpy “come on, geese” commands. Both father and daughter inevitably get attached to their charges, which begins to solve the bonding problem but leads to the second dilemma: What to do when the birds begin to fly?

Insisting it’s illegal for domestically raised geese to take flight, a local wildlife officer is determined to literally clip their wings. And since geese are taught how and where to migrate by their parents, how was Amy’s orphan flock going to find the threatened wetlands in North Carolina that was eager for their arrival?

The solution, based on successful real-life experiments carried out by a Canadian artist named Bill Lishman, makes use of both the father’s fascination with ultra-light aircraft and the way the geese have imprinted on the daughter. Fly away home indeed.

This scenario does more than sound sentimental, it is sentimental through and through, but that is more than offset by the magic created by seeing the gang in flight through Caleb Deschanel’s clear and luminous cinematography. Aside from a few computer-generated sequences (a flight through city streets is the most obvious one), the flying is done by real geese, and the soft, discreet touch director Ballard uses throughout works especially well here. By refusing to be cheap or insincere, “Fly Away Home” allows us to enjoy our emotions without feeling we’ve been criminally manipulated. Even pigs flying is not so rare a treat as that.

* MPAA rating: PG, opening accident scene and some mild language. Times guidelines: Accident involves the death of a parent.

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‘Fly Away Home’

Jeff Daniels: Thomas Alden

Anna Paquin: Amy Alden

Dana Delany: Susan Barnes

Terry Kinney: David Alden

Holter Graham: Barry Strickland

Jeremy Ratchford: Glen Siefert

A Sandollar production, released by Columbia Pictures. Director Carroll Ballard. Producers John Veitch, Carol Baum. Executive producer Sandy Gallin. Screenplay by Robert Rodat and Vince McKewin, based on the autobiography by Bill Lishman. Cinematographer Caleb Deschanel. Editor Nicholas C. Smith. Costumes Marie-Sylvie Deveau. Music Mark Isham. Production design Seamus Flannery. Set decorator Dan Conley. Running time: 1 hour, 47 minutes.

* In general release throughout Southern California.