‘That’s gonna be me, mom. When I get big, I’m gonna be just like her’
Goat, Sony Pictures Animation’s newest offering, introduces its title character – Will Harris – as an archetypal underdog right from the jump ball. He’s a 5’7 bipedal goat with a lifelong passion for roarball (basketball played by animals) who longs to become the G.O.A.T (Greatest of All Time) on the court.
Stranger Things star, Caleb McLaughlin, takes the ‘little guy with a big dream’ character we’ve seen a hundred times and gives him enough flair and heart to have us easily following his rise to the top, each step of his hoof bringing him closer to glory as part of his city’s ailing team, the Vineland Thorns, who just might finally win a tournament and take home the coveted Claw trophy.
Struggling to pay off his rent arrears, Will’s rags to riches story catapults him swiftly to fame, rubbing shoulders with his childhood hero, Jett Filmore, a towering panther and former star now on a crushing losing streak, her Thorns a team of misfits. Their voices include Derry Girls’ Nicola Coughlan as Olivia, a nervous ostrich with a social media-fuelled self-esteem problem, and David Harbour, another Hawkins alum, as Archie, a hulking rhino who just wants to do right by his two rambunctious daughters. But the stand-out is the self-proclaimed icon Modo, a vaguely European lizard whose growls are provided by Nick Kroll.
When I was introduced to this squad of colourful characters, I didn’t quite know what to make of them (we’ve all sat through one or two animated flicks that tried to give us bold characters and instead served up annoyance ad nauseam). But I was really surprised by the way that they all grew on me in a relatively short amount of time, to the point that when the team rises to the bigger leagues and the heat really piles on, I was brought along with them. I knew each player well enough to appreciate what they brought to each game.
It sounds simple enough, but it was a clever way of seating me in the stakes of the third act while also mirroring the rather egocentric Jett’s own realisations as to the value of her team as a unit, rather than a one-stop vehicle for her as the star player. Equally, each character’s arc complimented the final match-up against the biggest, baddest team of all (who else?) in a way that felt rewarding justified following their journeys along, which, again, lots of movies try and fail to do.
The film’s Zootropolis-esque animal kingdom is as visually striking as the animation itself, and despite its similarities to the world of Disney’s hit franchise, Vineland’s geography is different enough that the comparison becomes a non-issue. If Zootropolis is a bustling mega-hub of skyscrapers like London, Vineland is a more rural, hilly paradise like Edinburgh! I had a lot of fun taking in the little details of the environment that reflected things in our own world, like a cutesy court-side ‘kiss cam’ or a parrot director having a little labeled branch to sit on rather than a chair. Goat borrows the lower frame-rate animation of its Spiderverse cousins while offering a satisfying fluidity and speed to its energetic basketball sequences.
The script and pace carry that energy, too, occasionally to the film’s detriment. Clocking in at 100 minutes, Goat has little time to spare. Given that everything here feels fairly essential, I would have liked to see the movie given slightly more time to ensure that some of the emotional highs and lows hit in the way that they I wanted them to.
Again, as with our own world, Goat offers an ecosystem in which social media seems to be king, with the team’s every move open to comment and criticism by hordes of both fans and haters. It’s quite notable how much of a footprint the digital space has on the film as a whole and that environment was incorporated into the story itself in a way that I didn’t expect, but another side effect of this culture is that just about everyone talks like a Gen Alpha ‘chronically online’ young teen.
This is, of course, ultimately a kids movie and so it makes sense to give the younger generation what they want and let them see themselves reflected on-screen and to my ears, the writers hit the right note more often than not when it came to making the lingo feel authentic, but your mileage with ‘diss tracks’, ‘crypto’ and ‘mid’ will vary.
I went into Goat expecting a by-the-numbers underdog story with few surprises to speak of, and found myself throughly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. McLaughlin has a sense of fun and style to his central performance as Will that works well alongside his fellow teammates, who each feel distinct and memorable in their own way – and Modo especially had me laughing.
It’s visually striking and fast-paced, sometimes to a fault, but it delivers a story we’ve all heard before, with an unexpected earnestness that hammers a great message home for its child audience while also offering enough to keep the parents (and maybe even the critics) happy too.
Goat is in cinemas 13 February
