Fly Away Home is Anna Paquin's second well-known film. The first one, some three years earlier, was The Piano, in which she performed her Oscar-winning role at the age of nine. Where The Piano was a movie of deep drama, Fly Away Home is a family movie with remarkably beautiful and delicate cinematography that earned an Academy Award nomination. Anna's performance is again excellent, landing her a Young Artist Award.

The beginnings are frequently my favorite parts of movies. The way a movie starts usually is, and should be, the most carefully thought out part of it, and so the first few minutes tend to be a good indication of what is to follow, insofar as the style is concerned at least.

Fly Away Home's beginning faces a tough challenge: depict a young girl and her well-loved mother in a serious traffic accident, after which the girl – Amy Alden, played by Anna – wakes up in a hospital only to hear her mother is dead; and do that with beauty and delicacy. Fly Away Home pulls that off. The entire accident sequence is silent, with a gentle sound track playing in the background. Anna's wordless yet expressive comfort around her mother is evident. The contrast of the tragic events and the manner of presentation creates very suitably disturbing impression.

Amy's father, Thomas Alden (Jeff Daniels), whom she hasn't seen for many years, comes to take her from the hospital to his home in rural Canada. Having lived in New Zealand, Amy is now half a world away from everything familiar to her, grieving her mother, and depressed. Thomas is an inventor and artist of sorts, who spends his days building his gadgets and flying his own gliders. Amy feels lonely, and isn't entirely happy of the idea of her father, who could have but hasn't contacted her for so long time, now suddenly being someone who is supposed to be her caretaker.

Wandering in a nearby forest, Amy finds wild goose eggs, which she takes home and lovingly keeps warm until the hatching day. Out comes a bunch of adorable fuzzy, little chicks, for whom Amy is the most caring mother, a role the baby birds also accept and become imprinted with. Amy's life is no longer dull or without purpose.

But wild geese are not domestic animals: they will want to migrate into the south come the fall and the cold weathers. Normally, their parents would show them how, but Amy, as a human, isn't quite up to that task. "We could keep them in the barn," she suggests, in her ever-so-lovely New Zealand accent. "Sure. It's a little like a jail. Or we can clip their wings," her father sensibly answers. Both are thoughts that Amy isn't fond of. Finally, Thomas suggests that, since the birds follow Amy around, she shows them migration path by flying in an ultralight plane, and Amy is excited by the idea. And so begins the adventure part – by family movie standards – of Thomas and Amy flying south with the geese.

The strongest part of the movie is the cinematography, matched well by the soundtrack. The countryside around Thomas' house is beautiful, and many cuts are worthy of being made paintings from; though, in fact, in one of them the background apparently is a painting. The characters are filmed with similar care. Especially during the first half of the movie, when Amy and the geese are introduced with a delightful lack of haste, Anna communicates a great deal through her expressions only. She has a face as expressive as it is beautiful, though in an interesting way. That probably has something to do with the fact that many people consider this movie Anna's best, and an overall wonderful movie. For me, Fly Away Home is one of those movies from which I regularly view and listen to individual scenes, enjoying the sheer beauty and accent of them.

The DVD has some extras that mostly discuss geese, but there are some notable bits with Anna too. For example, Anna is being asked to show her Geese imitation, but she's too shy and giggly to oblige. I found it charming how an actress of Anna's caliber is, behind the scenes, such a normal young girl, with no abnormal self-confidence. This might show through in the movie, and aid in making Amy appear a more real person.

Another thing mentioned in the extras is how much Anna grew, physically, during the making of the movie. Once you hear that, it's possible to notice in the movie. You can make fair guesses about relative shooting order of some scenes. To this day I haven't been able to make up my mind of whether to consider Anna a child or a teenager in this movie. Not that such labeling makes any difference, but I like to give things names.

Fly Away Home is a feast for eyes and ears, if you enjoy the style or like Anna. Put together the gorgeous cinematography, the gentle soundtrack and Anna's excellent-as-ever acting and perfect fit for the role are enough to overcome the simplistic plot and all the goose talk that I'm personally not interested in. I'm a sucker for both the style of the movie and Anna, and so I value Fly Away Home as one of my treasures.