GOAT (2026)

The comeback kid

It is not basketball. It is “roarball.” Don’t you dare call it basketball. Sure, there are baskets, and a ball, and dribbling, and slam dunks, but don’t be fooled — the two sports are worlds apart. The differences are many. For instance, um… well… okay, roarball has dangerous themed courts strewn with obstacles, and a considerably more relaxed attitude toward traveling violations. Semantics aside, GOAT is the best animated basketball movie ever made, a claim I make with the caveat that my only points of comparison are the cheesy Space Jam and the dreadful Space Jam 2 (aka “A New Legacy”… isn’t that an oxymoron?).

(Edit: It has been pointed out to me that I completely missed The First Slam Dunk when making the above statement. I haven’t seen it but have heard only good stuff.)

This is the latest outing from Sony Pictures Animation, following last year’s KPop Demon Hunters. (And, erm, Fixed.) That means more Spider-Verse style kinetic energy and hyper-stylized animation. That is the big triumph of GOAT – offering deeply satisfying and gloriously choreographed “roarball” sequences on top of a harmless, functional story.

The premise is a classic undergoat story. Will Harris (Caleb McLaughlin), a pint-sized goat with outsized dreams, lands a walk-on position on the local roarball team after a video of him playing on the streets and humiliating a bigger animal goes viral. The pro league is dominated by bears, rhinos, and big cats roughly twice his size. Nobody wants the little guy on the roster, least of all Jett Fillmore (Gabrielle Union), the respected vet whose reputation is tarnished because she’s never won a ring. Will intends to prove that, to borrow the film’s rallying cry, “smalls can ball.” Like Bull Durham (or F1, or 500 other sports flicks), Jett the vet and Will the greenhorn must find some synthesis in their games by playoff time.

That familiarity is a ceiling on the film, but it’s not really a liability. GOAT hits every beat you could chart on a napkin before the lights go down: the doubters, the unexpected rise, the reticent mentor, the slump, the inspiring speech, the big game. It has very little interest in surprising you; but then, this is for the kiddos, and it might be fresh for them just Space Jam once was for me. The pacing is a little wonky: the script takes awhile to get going, then blazes through some other beats. But it’s far from catastrophic, especially at 100 quick minutes

What GOAT is interested in is movement, and on that front it’s a knockout. The Sony Pictures Animation house style is accompanied with terrific art design of a “concrete jungle”; city life blending with nature in striking ways. The fluid, elastic, gloriously overcaffeinated camera direction, which I am not yet tired of in this animated Sony pictures, gives the roarball segments tremendous pep. The character designs are strong, too, chunky and expressive and varied, and the color palette is a mix of botanical green-browns with steely city blue-grays. It’s excellent stuff. The settings are thrilling, too; courts morph and reconfigure mid-play, hurling hazards at the athletes like a Super Smash Bros. stage crossed with the Goblet of Fire trials. The action-forward set pieces are a clever way to make a sports movie feel like an action adventure.

Debut director Tyree Dillihay has spoken in interviews that he sees basketball as a melting pot of sports, hip hop culture, branding, and celebrity. The film wears that thesis pretty openly, occasionally to a fault: It was marketed as a big Steph Curry project (he has a supporting voice role). The wall-to-wall Under Armour and Mercedes product placement are a bit much. The film also pushes quite far into the kinetic mayhem; I confess to feeling a little overstimulated at a couple of moments. (It also has pretty dumb usage of the term “GOAT” as in “greatest of all time,” which is the film’s obvious play on words. Then again, it doesn’t misapply the term nearly to the level of Him.)

I appreciated that underneath this all are a few whiffs of class commentary: The bigs versus the smalls is a much looser take on race or privilege than the obvious Zootopia comparison. On that note, the film has many obvious Zootopia comparisons: The mixed animal living spaces with animals of vastly different proportions and natures, all still mingling in a way that feels like human urban chaos. It is, in truth, about as well-realized as the Zootopias; in fact, moreso, because it dwells less on the gimmick of this setup and shows it as just part of the characters’ lives.

None of this adds up to a classic. But it is certainly diverting, even charming. GOAT is loud, familiar, a bit exhausting, and a lot of fun, and its animation is strong enough to forgive a script that colors so faithfully inside the lines. It knows exactly what it wants to be, and it gets there with energy to spare. GOAT slams that basketball through the hoop. Sorry… that roarball.

Is It Good?

Good (5/8)

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Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.