GOAT

The Geometry of the Underdog

It feels like we’ve finally hit the limit of what a sports montage can do to the human eye. In Tyree Dillihay’s *GOAT*, 'roarball' is a high-stakes contact sport where apex predators toggle between walking upright and sprinting on all fours. The matches play out in arenas made of volcanic rock and breakable ice. We see this world through Will (Caleb McLaughlin, who brings a strained, eager earnestness to the role), a knee-high Boer goat desperate to join the Vineland Thorns. He lives in a garage the size of a gerbil cage, completely dwarfed by a city of panthers and rhinoceroses. You feel his physical disadvantage in every shot, with the camera tilting sharply upward to show just how ridiculous his dreams really are.



Your enjoyment of the chaos depends on your tolerance for sensory overload. Sony Pictures Animation has spent years tearing up the visual rulebook for American cartoons, and Dillihay gleefully uses those pieces here. We get shifting frame rates, shaky handheld aesthetics, and a stylized 'Goat Vision' that pauses the action so Will can calculate court geometry. It’s an undeniably slick trick, even if we’ve become so used to visual miracles from this studio that we expect every film to look like a pop-art installation. The arenas feel like living ecosystems; in one sequence on a frozen court, you can practically hear the ice crack under Mane Attraction, an arrogant Andalusian horse voiced by Aaron Pierre. The animators make those heavy, furry bodies hitting the ground feel tactile and wince-inducing.



The script often trips over the art. It feels a bit strange to complain about a predictable underdog story in a movie co-produced by Stephen Curry—someone who built a career on being the undersized outsider. Curry even voices a gangly giraffe named Lenny. But there’s a mechanical stiffness to the dialogue that the fluid animation can't quite mask. Gabrielle Union is a standout as Will’s idol, Jett Fillmore; her performance has a raspy exhaustion that shows in the character’s slumped shoulders before she even speaks. The movie often rushes past these quiet beats to reach the next deafening buzzer-beater. In her review for *The Guardian*, Cath Clarke complained that watching this is like standing next to a helicopter taking off, and she isn't entirely wrong.



Perhaps I’m overthinking a family comedy about a basketball-playing farm animal. Kids are definitely going to laugh when Nicola Coughlan’s ostrich buries her head in the floor after a bad pass, and they’ll cheer when Will inevitably proves that smalls can indeed ball. Dillihay has engineered a loud, polished machine that hits every emotional beat right on schedule. I just wish the narrative took as many chances as the geometry of the animation. If you’re going to build a world where a komodo dragon throws an alley-oop over an active volcano, you’d hope the writing wouldn’t settle for a standard layup.