Sony Animation went through a number of styles before landing on what has become their belated signature. They’re now closely associated with the juddery, angular, splash-page artistry of the Spider-Verse movies and KPop Demon Hunters, but at one time Sony was reliably unreliable, sometimes purveying CG squash-and-stretch throwbacks (the Hotel Transylvania and Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs series), barely-distinguishable cuteness (Surf’s Up), and outright garbage (movies featuring various emojis and Angry Birds). Their new project, Goat, is a chance to see whether the studio’s new, and newly influential, house style can be equally compatible with a boilerplate talking-animal story lacking the fantastical, gravity-defying, zeitgeist-friendly visions of superheroes and girl groups.
Well, a little bit of gravity still gets defied; Goat is a basketball cartoon in all but name, focusing on an animal world where creatures of all shapes and sizes (but mostly big ones) play “roarball,” which looks a lot like basketball, but with some additional, videogame-like environmental challenges. (How is it not called beastketball?!) Will Harris (Caleb McLaughlin)—a scrappy little goat, not the equally scrappy A.V. Club contributor—aspires to play pro roarball, despite the fact that he’s constantly told he’s too small to compete with the likes of Jett Fillmore (Gabrielle Union), the possibly-fading star of his local team, the Thorns. But when a video of Will holding his own against the towering superstar Mane Attraction (Aaron Pierre) goes viral—finally, a movie that offers the chance for characters to repeatedly say “going viral!”—he’s recruited to join the Thorns and play alongside his hero Jett, as well as a small ensemble of potentially great but currently scattershot misfits. Nick Kroll playing a zany, Uno-dealing Komodo dragon; things of this nature.
McLaughlin, best known as Lucas on Stranger Things, is joined by several of his costars from that show: David Harbour voices a rhino teammate, while Eduardo Franco (also known as Argyle) joins Sherry Cola as Will’s pair of supportive besties. Maybe even more of that cast should have been recruited, just to give this grab bag of vocalizations a little more unity. It’s always a little weird to hear someone who has previously given a perfect voiceover performance in a top-tier cartoon, as Patton Oswalt did in Ratatouille, demoted to jostling around in a supporting role amidst up-and-comers (Pierre), veteran actors not known for their animation work (Union), and assorted stunt-casters (Jelly Roll; producer Stephen Curry).
There are dozens of ways in which Goat plays very much like a generic animated sorta-comedy that could have come from any number of second-to-fourth-tier studios. (At least this attempt to capitalize on vaguely urban youth culture doesn’t feature talking sneakers.) Even the distinguishing feature of its basketball roots largely breezes by in a series of montages, with attempted jazz-ups via the natural world’s intrusions upon the court (falling rocks, ice formation, etc.). It seems to want some free-throw points for being somewhat more respectful of the game than the alternately prank-based and cornily reverential treatment seen in the Space Jam duology.
But two things keep Goat from becoming the Sing of animated sports movies. One is that Sony animation style, even if this version looks more like Diet Spider-Verse than KPop Demon Ballers. Though the visual and joke density doesn’t match the best recent Sony cartoons, the character designs make the characters’ size disparities fluid and appealing, like the whole movie is taking place during that scale-shifting chase scene from the original Zootopia. The second is the degree to which director Tyree Dillihay appears to trust both the animation style and his story, and doesn’t push too hard to pack the movie with nonstop yammering. It’s antic, sure, and has plenty of middling jokes. But Will makes a sweet-natured and earnest hero, and it’s particularly nice to see a movie where a young male unabashedly hero-worships a female athlete. Roarball is both a mixed-species and coed professional sport, true to the movie’s unforced sense of inclusivity.
That’s all to say that Goat seems self-evidently unembarrassed to admit that it is, in fact, a movie for kids. At the same time, it’s not relentlessly pandering to that audience; it just trusts that younger kids will become invested in a zippy little sports story, and their parents can enjoy the playful craft of the animation, or perhaps let their minds harmlessly wander. The movie is a little more fun in its early stretches, as it explores the ramshackle jungle-canopy-style city of Vineland. (Somehow, its name is not changed to One Basketball After Another.) The actual sports stuff feels a little sweatier, with too much clamor for each animal teammate to really pop. But Goat still leaps over the worst pitfalls of big-studio kid-centric animation. Where it counts, the movie knows just enough ball.
Director: Tyree Dillihay
Writers: Aaron Buchsbaum, Teddy Riley
Starring: Caleb McLaughlin, Gabrielle Union, Aaron Pierre, David Harbour, Jenifer Lewis, Patton Oswalt, Nick Kroll, Nicola Coughlin
Release Date: February 13, 2026
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