Animals on a Mission!

There's nothing more heartwarming (and heartbreaking) as an animal on a quest, whether it's getting back to a beloved owner or saving a friend. As a dove, a donkey and friends embark on their own historic adventure in 'The Star,' we look at other animated tales with animals on the go!

In this fourth chipmunks movie, Alvin, Simon and Theodore must travel to Miami where they think their pal Dave is about to propose to a girl -- and dump them as friends in the process.

A timid apatosaurus, Arlo, gets separated from his family and must travel far and wide to make his way back home. Luckily, a young feral caveboy is there to help guide the way.

A spin-off of the 'Wallace & Gromit' franchise, this cute film sees Shaun and the other farm animals trying to get to the big city and find their missing owner. Unfortunately, they'll need to elude a tenacious animal control officer.  

When Scrat accidentally sets off the breakup of Pangaea, the herd is separated, and must escape the clutches of a band of pirates as they struggle to make their way home.

In the last  'Madagascar' release, we find our loveable gang on a trek through Europe with a circus, which they're using as a cover to get back to their beloved New York.

If you grew up in the '80s you probably wax nostalgic for this (well, pretty terrible) 1982 Rankin/Bass fantasy in which Mia Farrow voices a solitary unicorn who ventures on a quest to find out what happened to the others of her kind. 

This little-seen but terrific film by Zack Snyder involves owls whose journey takes them from the Tyto forest, to almost-slavery, on a flight through rain and cold, to the Great Tree for training, then off for a final showdown in the faraway canyonland home of evil owls who plan to take over the world.

When a Hollywood-star dog is accidentally shipped with a sound stage to New York, he must find his way back to get to his owner, Penny. In the real world, he discovers he's not really endowed with the heroic super powers his TV persona has, and must rely on an abandoned housecat and a TV-obsessed hamster to make the cross-country trip back home.

Not so much globetrotting critters as just animals headed down two separate paths, the fox and the hound are two friends from childhood who eventually end up on two sides of the natural divide. When grown-up Cooper, now a hunter's hound, ends up on a preserve with his old friend Tod the Fox, he's faced with the ultimate dilemma -- serve his master or do what's right by his friend.

Tap-dancing across Antarctica, Elijah Wood voices Mumble, an Emperor penguin who's not quite all that when it comes to singing abilities, but who can more than hold his own when it comes to shaking his feathers. Unfortunately, this unusual quality gets him cast out of Emperor Land. Can he get back home in one piece?

While definitely not viewing fare for the youngest audiences, rarely have fuzzy animal cartoons been depicted with as much realism and violence as this one. In the end, though, it's a well-told story about rabbits who flee their old home and must protect their new one.

This Pixar-animated adventure -- one of the company's all-time best -- starred Nemo, a little adolescent clown fish who gets taken from his Dad and his home by a diver and put in a fish tank. Nemo’s Dad, Marlin, teams up with Dory, a very forgetful fish, and sets out on an adventure across the ocean to find his son.

When Blu,a domesticated blue macaw from small-town Minnesota, is taken to Rio de Janeiro, it's all he can do to escape his captors and get back home to his human. Especially since he can't fly.

When Littlefoot, a young plant-eating brontosaurus is orphaned, he seeks out the Great Valley, where food and shelter are plentiful and others of his kind are rumored to exist.

In this '80s gem, a young mouse named Fievel Mousekewitz and his Jewish-Russian family move from New York to the Wild West in hopes of a better future. During the trip, Fievel discovers that the train filled with mice is a trap set by cats trying to make mice meat pie. Fievel must now find a way to save everyone alongside side-kicks including a friendly kitty named Tiger and burly sheriff Wylie Burp.