Homeward Bound: Everything Changed From The Original ’60s Movie

Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey is a classic Disney film about two dogs and a cat trying to find their way back to their owners after mistakenly believing that they were abandoned, but the one most people are familiar with is hardly the only one to exist. The one most people would recognize released in 1993 and stars Michael J. Fox as a wily loner Bulldog named Chance, Sally Field a sarcastic Himalayan named Sassy, and Don Ameche as a wise old Golden Retriever named Shadow. The trio goes through a series of trials and tribulations on their way back home, and along the way, they even come to love each other as much as they love their owners.

It’s a very classic, feel-good movie from the nineties, but as previously stated, it’s not the only version of the story, with the live-action movie from 1993 being a remake of an older film, and both films are even adapted from a children’s book. Said book was written by Sheila Burnford and published in 1961. It was simply called The Incredible Journey, and it was adapted into a Disney film of the same name two years later in 1963. The two films don’t differ much regarding the basic story, but going beyond that is where divergences can be found.

One major difference that can be noted right from the start is that the main characters in Homeward Bound all have their animal language translated into English, whereas the versions of them from The Incredible Journey are all silent. The story in the former is carried through the dialogue the animals share while the original from the ’60s has its story moved forward through narration, resulting in a lot of the thoughts and feelings of the animals needing to be explicitly told as opposed to being inferred through dialogue. This, in turn, can cause The Incredible Journey to feel a lot slower than the remake, but that sort of style isn’t automatically a hindrance to an otherwise entertaining film.

Another difference is in the human characters and their overall relevancy to the Homeward Bound story. In the process of remaking the original Disney film from the sixties, Homeward Bound gave the animals’ owners, the Burnford-Seaver family, a decent amount of screentime showing how they react to the sudden disappearance of their pets, the efforts they go through to find them, and even how they bond as a family throughout the story. Meanwhile, The Incredible Journey has the animals’ owners, the Hunters, and their caretaker, John Longridge, in much more limited roles. As a result, their involvement in the story ends up becoming secondary to the animals their struggles.

There are also a variety of cosmetic differences between each film. Continuing on with the animals, The Incredible Journey’s depiction of them is more in line with their depiction in the original book. As such, the characters who would become the remake’s leads are a Labrador named Luath, a male—as opposed to Sassy being a girl—Siamese cat named Tao, and an old Bull Terrier named Bodger; this also means that the roles and dynamic of Chance and Shadow are essentially a reversal of Luath and Bodger. Homeward Bound also has the story set in California as opposed to Ontario like The Incredible Journey and the original book, and the journey, itself, has a few differences in the remake, such as an encounter with a mountain lion, a prison break from a pound, and the original film’s climax of the animals getting caught in a blizzard being replaced with Shadow falling into a hole, spraining his leg, and needing Chance to talk him out of being left to die.

In conclusion, Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey hits a lot of the same beats as The Incredible Journey from thirty years prior, but it still ends up becoming a different product. That being said, one isn’t automatically superior to the other, and when it comes down to it, both films have their own merits and are more than worth a watch.