Anyone remember when the term “GOAT” used to be described as a bad thing?! Remember when “GOAT” was meant to refer to someone as a scapegoat whenever their sports team suffered a humiliating loss that put a dark cloud on them that made them lose sleep overnight?! Remember when “GOAT” symbolized “sinners, rebellion, or those separated from God for judgment” like it was depicted as in the bible?! Well, just like about every single meme, gif, slang, and cultural touchstone that Gen Z has gotten their greasy hands on for the past decade, “GOAT” now means something else entirely.
In modern times, “GOAT” now refers to someone as strictly the “GREATEST OF ALL TIME”! “GOAT” is simply someone that is just the best of the best at what they do! Or in the case of Sony’s newest animated feature, GOAT, it’s simply about a teenager named Will Harris, who just so happens to be a literal goat, trying to work his way up to the top and become the professional roarball player he has always dreamed of so he may one day become a “GOAT” of his own! (I don’t think I’ve ever said the word, “GOAT” more times in my life than I just did in the first two paragraphs of this review!)
While I wouldn’t put it on the same level as Sony Animation’s recent animated masterclasses such as Spider-Verse, The Mitchells vs the Machines, and K-Pop: Demon Hunters, GOAT still works well on it’s own merits as a cute if not very déjà vu-like story thanks to it’s amusing gags, stunning visuals, likable characters, and relatable messages that everyone can get behind! It does move a bit too fast for my liking, giving the impression it was designed to appease the fast-scrolling TikTok obsessed crowd, and I don’t know if it will win over those that are not fond of the standard cliches that are found in these sports movies but for a new animated original film released in our year 2026, you can’t ask for anything more competent.
Premise: The story follows Will (Caleb McLaughlin), a small goat with big dreams who gets a once-in-a-lifetime shot to join the pros and play roarball – a high-intensity, co-ed, full-contact sport dominated by the fastest, fiercest animals in the world. Will’s new teammates aren’t thrilled about having a little goat on their roster, but Will is determined to revolutionize the sport and prove once and for all that “smalls can ball!”
When reading that description alone, you can basically tell where GOAT’s head is at right from the get-go! We have a small fry who has great ambitions to one day live out his childhood dreams of become the “GOAT” in the sport that he loves and become the ultimate superstar that changes the game entirely, just like his idols before him. It hits the same beats you would expect from a typical underdog story and very rarely tries to subvert way from those tropes. However, there are elements that GOAT does on it’s own that helps distances it enough from those typical underdog sport stories.
First off, it has the guts to acknowledge that one players does NOT equal to one whole team. No matter how good one particular player maybe, they can’t win a darn thing if they don’t have a fully form team to back them up. We see that perfectly with Jett Fillmore (Gabrielle Union). She might be a GOAT of her own (even though she’s actually a black panther) and Will’s idol but she’s not a fairy that can magically wish her team, the Thorns, a championship if she wants, she needs her magic pixie dust of her own that she can spread around her squad so they may one day play together to actually win the big game. It’s only when she meets Will that she is now given that chance to live up to her superstardom and have a trophy around her head.
It’s also quite refreshing to have a sports movie that pits the male and female dynamic together without making a big deal about it or even acknowledging it. There’s not one moment where one specific gender takes down another or vice versa because they are of that one specific gender. The film treats boys and girls working together as completely natural and not something you should think too much about or portray in a completely different light. Each member of the team is given their own individual moment to shine and eye popping imagery of their own while also able to serve Will’s arc of working hard to make a difference in roarball. It makes for a nice if not quite subtle commentary on gender equality and the importance of putting differences behind in order to work together to achieve your main goal.
And if you are looking at strictly as a basketball movie, then it definitely works too. The basketball sequences are quite entertaining, delivering some of the best sequences of the entire film with each member of the Thorns getting the opportunity to score some points of their own. It also does help to have veteran basketball stars to the cast such as Stephen Curry as Lenny the giraffe, Dwyane Wade as Rosette, Kevin Love as Daskas, Angel Reese as Propp, and a few others to help evaluate the experience. The film doesn’t offer a brand new perspective on the sport other than perhaps how a player handles the press and social media but it does deliver the goods on what fans of basketball would want in a movie that represents their sport.
Speaking of which, the voice cast is a lot of fun here and helps bring extra depth to their characters. Caleb McLaughin is likable and engaging as the main lead Will, even if you can see his development going from the very beginning. Garbielle Union stands out as perhaps the most engaging character of the film as Jett Filmore, the player that wants to win it all the most but lacks the resources and shared will in order to do so. Nick Kroll is entertaining as the komodo dragon who can breath fire, David Harbour plays the same father figure role he did in Black Widow, Thunderbolts*, and Stranger Things but still manages to make it work, and Patton Oswalt delivers the best laughs of the whole movie as the head coach Dennis (although he will still always be Remy to me whenever he voices an animated character!).
The animation is of course gorgeous and helps bring the film its own distinct personality without it feeling like it’s trying too hard to ape recent animated films with this similar visual style. The world itself is fun to explore and is loaded with a bunch of colorful animated furry animals that would make for a proper home next to the worlds of Zootopia and The Bad Guys. And while there are times where the soundtrack by Kris Bowers (The Wild Robot) is trying a bit too hard to capture the same punkrock lightning of the bottle of the Spider-Verse films, it does work to the film’s advantages whenever it needs to.
If there is one thing that holds GOAT back, as mentioned before, that would be it’s very familiar and paper thin plot. As mentioned before, there is nothing here that we haven’t seen before in these underdog sports movies. Even if this story hasn’t been this told before in the form of animation that is THIS beautiful and includes a couple of elements thrown in that aren’t included as much nowadays with these movies, you will likely see major story beats coming from a mile away. Even if the road getting to the destination takes a few different turns and routes than expected, the destination is still all the same.
The pacing can also be a bit too breath neck, not giving certain moments the time to breathe because the film is anxious to get to the next slam dunk moment to another, giving the indication that the filmmakers thought kids would get bored too quickly if it wasn’t constantly moving from Point A to Point B without a big visual or setpiece happening on screen. And while there are jokes in here that are quite funny, there are certain ones that are too obvious and quite eyerolling (They just HAD to include a screaming goat gag somewhere because…..of course!), with a few too many “modern” references to boot.
Thankfully, all the flaws for GOAT can be forgiven because of the amount heart and enjoyment the film itself brings. There’s plenty in here for lovers of basketball and those that enjoy a good animated family flick to chew on here, with many easter eggs and references scattered throughout that diehard NBA and WNBA fans will have a blast looking for through the 95-minute long runtime. It’s amusing, charming, beautifully animated, and even if it tells a very familiar story, it’s able to stand well as it’s own original animated film with no established franchise or prior entries to weight it down.
Between this, Pixar’s Hoppers, DreamWorks’s Forgotten Island, and Disney’s Hexed, 2026 seems like the year where western animation studios will have to work hard to get their latest original animated films to be a success, proving that they don’t always need to rely on nostalgia and endless sequels to make a smash hit in theaters. If the early box office projections for GOAT and Hoppers are anything to go by, we are off to a good start but let’s hope the actual audiences are “GOAT” enough (I swear that is the LAST time I will do that in this review!) to show up and prove exactly that.
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