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"Woo, hoo, here I come! Woo, hoo, back to you! There is no home like the one you've got, 'cause that home belongs to you!"
— Bolt, "Barking at the moon"
Basically, a story where the main goal is to get home.
These stories begin with some sort of displacement: The child is separated from his parents, or the family moves and accidentally leaves the dog behind. This is The Call to Adventure. From there, the story essentially follows the long, winding journey of The Quest, except there's usually no evil wizard to fight at the end — once our heroes reach their destination, that's the end of their Hero's Journey. Tropes frequently seen in this type of story: The Wacky Wayside Tribe, the Travel Montage, Hitchhiker Heroes.
This differs from Home Sweet Home in that the focus here is on the journey to get back. Marty McFly wants to get back to his own time, but he stays in the same town the whole movie; Odysseus wants to get home, and he travels all over ancient Greece ( and beyond) to get there. Structurally, the Homeward Journey is closer to The Quest than The Voyage and Return. It's common for works using this plot to be a Whole Plot Reference to The Odyssey.
In an open-ended series, this inevitably leads to Failure Is the Only Option, because Status Quo Is God; films and series with a definite arc are more forgiving.
Contrast Boring Return Journey.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
Comic Books
- Legion Lost: A handful of Legionnaires end up in an unknown region of space and try to find their way back.
- One part of DC's 52 mini-series follows Adam Strange, Starfire and Animal Man, who were stranded in an unknown galaxy at the end of Infinite Crisis. Before they can return to Earth, they have to ally with some questionable folks and survive dangerous encounters.
Film
- Apollo13: In 1970, the Apollo 13 was launched, headed for the moon. But this ill-fated flight would never reach its goal.
- The Incredible Journey and its remake Homeward Bound The Incredible Journey. Two dogs and a cat travel through California to get back to their masters.
- The Brave Little Toaster: Five appliances travel from country to city to find their old master.
- Bolt: A dog from Hollywood is accidentally transported to New York and has to make his way back to find his "person." Are you sensing a theme, yet?
- The Land Before Time: A team of young dinosaurs, separated from their families, go on a long trek through hostile land to get to the Great Valley.
- The Adventures of Milo and Otis
- O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a modern day take on The Odyssey, following the struggles of an escaped prisoner's long journey home.
- The Wizard of Oz: There is a big fight at the end between Dorothy and the Witch, but her goal at the start of the movie is to get back to Kansas, although it's not so much of a fight in the book.
- Madagascar: A group of zoo animals from New York find themselves stranded in Madagascar and spend at least three movies trying to get home.
- The Warriors is about a Coney Island gang traveling through New York to get home while the entire city's street gangs are hunting for them. It's based loosely on Anabasis
- Homeward Bound, astoundingly enough.
Literature
- The Odyssey: Ur Example and Trope Maker.
- Also a lost epic, the Returns, which deals with the journeys home of other important Achaeans.
- The Anabasis by Xenophon
- Robert A. Heinlein's Job: A Comedy of Justice. While being beset by random shifts into Alternate Universes, Alexander Hergensheimer tries desperately to get home to his home state of Kansas.
- Jack Vance's The Eyes Of The Overworld starts with the, er, "hero", Cugel falling foul of the wizard Iconnu and being flown thousands of miles northward by a demon to a desolate beach. The core of the story is his quest to return home. Painfully, Cugel muffs the final confrontation and while trying to target Iconnu for the same fate manages to get himself send right back to the beach, mere feet from where it all began. Getting home again is the meat of the next book, a Surprisingly Improved Sequel.
- The Bible: The Exodus, the return of the Exiles, and the parable of The Prodigal Son.
- Arabian Nights: Sindbad does this seven times.
- Diana Wynne Jones's The Homeward Bounders. The main character, Jamie, witnesses somethings playing what look like a wargame... except the game they're playing is only a representation. They're actually playing the game with his world as a board, and people as pieces. So They exile him to wander through different worlds, with the proviso that once he finds his home, he no longer has to keep wandering. Or at least, this is the plot for the first 3/4s of the book... then Jamie discovers that because time moves oddly on different worlds, his world has moved on and his home no longer exists.
- In Ribsy, a Beverly Cleary book, Henry Huggins's dog gets into the wrong family's car in a mall parking lot and has to find his way home.
- Moonrise in the Warrior Cats series. The journey to the sea was hard, but the journey home is just as dangerous (In fact, one of them didn't make it back.)
- The Incredible Journey has it right there in the title. It's about three pets, a cat and two dogs, crossing the Canadian wilderness to get home.
Live-Action TV
Manhwa
New Media
- Naka Teleeli's ongoing Minecraft: Journey Home series of vids, which focuses on him trying to get back home after the events of the Minecraft Survival Let's Play.
Video Games
- Homeworld centers on the revelation that your race's current world, Kharak, was not the planet you came from, and your efforts to try and reach your original planet, Hiigara. The fact that Kharak is razed a few missions in, killing everyone on it and meaning You Can't Go Home Again, sort of forces the issue.
- BIT.TRIP Flux has that as one of the main themes.
- One of the scenarios in Elite Beat Agents features a lost dog trying to get back to his owner.
Web Comics
- In Beyond Reality, Orion and Laura are traveling through worlds to get home.
- Digger wants to go home, but doesn't have much of an idea how to go about it, and more pressing matters keep coming up. We never do find out if she gets home, as the comic ends right before she leaves town with the merchant, but given her tenacity it's a safe bet she does.
- Sluggy Freelance uses this trope a lot, given its love affair with Trapped in Another World stories.
- Para-Ten
Western Animation
- ReBoot. Enzo and AndrAIa spend a decent chunk of the third season "Game Hopping" from system to system and traveling through the web to find Mainframe.
- The Pagemaster is about Richard just trying to leave the library and go home.
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