Fly Away Home with mooses

Fly Away Home is a beloved movie in my house. If you haven't seen it, now would be the time to do so, before you read this and find the entire plot crudely outlined. In the movie Jeff Daniels plays a Canadian inventor/artist with a penchant for ultralight planes. When his ex wife dies in a car accident in New Zealand it turns out he'd better learn how to be a father fast because his heartbroken, barely known anymore to him, daughter, played by a young Anna Paquin, is now his full responsibility.

In Fly Away Home, this pre-teen Anna Paquin starts to find the beginning thread of healing when she finds and spontaneously adopts a clutch of orphaned geese.

I adore this lovely movie. I think it is very nearly a perfect movie. I would make only one small, tiny really, change to it. I think instead of finding baby geese, Anna Paquin should rescue baby mooses.

A mother moose, dying of global warming related causes, like parasites who no longer die off due to warm winters, dies under the stress of local fracking and the complications of giving birth to moose triplets. Anna Paquin finds the triplets and gives the baby mooses all the chocolate milk from her lunch causing them to think of her as their mom. She hides the moose in her dad's barn/studio. There are some antics with her acquiring dozens of gallons of chocolate milk. But because, after a week or two, the three mooses are frisky and each the size of a white-tailed deer, she is found out.

However, as this is the first interest Anna has shown in anything since coming to Canada, she is allowed to keep the moose, who now follow her everywhere while she bugles.

A game warden, who at first seems helpful, finds out about the mooses and says people aren't allowed to have pet mooses in Canada, which shows how bad things have gotten in Canada with the fracking and conservative government. Then he pulls out a small pocket saw and tries to cut off one of the moose's antlers, either to hang up in his weekend cabin or maybe because captive moose in Canada aren't allowed to grow antlers because they can easily put someone's eye out.

So after Jeff Daniels throws out the evil game warden they decide they should teach the moose, who are normally non migratory animals, to migrate. They can get the mooses to go south in Summer to Minnesota where everyone will be happy to see them cause all our moose died, and we miss them, and then they can go back to Canada in Winter where all their parasites can die in the necessary bitter cold and make life difficult for evil game wardens who will have to sweep up all the dead parasites.

Now in this slightly improved version of the movie Jeff Daniels is not an ultralight plane enthusiast, rather he's a tractor enthusiast. So they dress up a tractor like a moose and try to get the young mooslings to follow it. But the moose won't follow Jeff Daniels so young Anna Paquin has to go too on an adventure of a lifetime on a tractor, while bugling.

And then my wife and I, sitting in our vacation home over Lake Superior, see five mooses working their way down our shoreline. One of the mooses looks like Jeff Daniels and one like Anna Paquin, and I am so excited to finally see mooses on our shoreline that I tell you all about it in my blog. But you think I'm just being silly, and you don't believe me at all.

But then later you see the move Fly Away Home (With Mooses), and you are very, very sorry you ever doubted me.