Lewis, a brilliant young inventor, is keen on creating a time machine to find his mother, who abandoned him in an orphanage. Things take a turn when he meets Wilbur Robinson and his family.
(Remarkably, this is not the first time Disney has offered up the same gag: In the 2007 animated movie Meet the Robinsons, a segment taking place decades in the future featured a Space-Mountain-y ride at a theme park called “Todayland.”)
But seeing reminders of all those films, while celebratory on the surface, also highlighted how similar “Encanto” is to those dozens of other films, from “Meet the Robinsons” to “Beauty and the Beast.”
More annoying, Despicable Me borrows left and right from other, better animated/kids films, lifting ideas from The Grinch, Meet the Robinsons, The Incredibles, A Series of Unfortunate Events and Toy Story (the minions are nothing more than a carbon copy of the alien squeeze toys in that film).