Stephen Curry’s Inclusive, Richly Animated Basketball Movie Soars Above its Standard Rim

Sure sports activities movie formulation are formulation for a purpose. There’s the story of the underdog who defies all odds (Rocky), the story of the ageing veteran who beats again father time (The Wrestler), the story of a plucky athlete with outsized ambition nobody respects (Marty Supreme), and the story of a crew with no price range that scraps collectively their assets in surprisingly efficient methods (Moneyball). GOAT makes use of all of them. A film that has no scarcity of pre-chewed clichés most likely should not work, and but, it resoundingly does.

Tyree Dillihay’s directorial debut is a actually efficient, stunningly animated, inspiring success. Aaron Buchsbaum and Teddy Riley’s script, run-of-the-mill it might be at instances, is aware of precisely learn how to plug-and-play sure established tenants of the heartwarming sports activities movie. It does so with simply sufficient innovation to make it its personal. These are filmmakers who perceive the attraction of the sports activities world’s cogent poetics, through which binary heroes and villains, unusual ambition and relentless work ethic all coalesce right into a bodily artwork type that’s broadly interesting. GOAT might not upend what a sports activities movie can do, however it does reinforce why we hold returning to the courtroom season after season.

GOAT’s Distinctive Qualities and Emphasis on Range Paper Over Its Clichés

GOAT is tough to separate from the identification of Stephen Curry, the Golden State Warriors’ surefire Corridor-of-Famer who serves as a producer and as a voice actor. Centered as it’s on Will Harris (Stranger Issues‘ Caleb McLaughlin), a diminutive 5’7 teenage goat with a candy exterior jumpshot whom everybody dismisses on the easy foundation of his measurement, GOAT feels slightly like a self-congratulatory portrait. However the roots run deeper than that, and, in the end, the movie is much less about one ballplayer’s capability than the ripple impact of permitting variety into the world of sports activities.

Will is a roarball-obsessed child whose lifelong love of his hometown crew, the Vineland Thorns, has put him on an inextinguishable quest to change into the primary “small” to play within the huge leagues. Roarball is for all intents and functions, the identical factor as basketball, besides that it’s performed by a wide range of the animal kingdom’s largest species on geologically-specific courts. The Thorns play in a greenhouse the place overflowing vines, natural world creep onto the courtroom; the crew’s central rival, the Magma, play atop an energetic volcano; the Shivers play on a frozen tundra, and so forth. By way of world-building, this is not a lot totally different than Zootopia.

Will is so obsessed together with his dream that the fixed epithets he will get on the native courts about his stature by no means hassle him. He’s additionally so dedicated to his dream that he’s far behind on his payments, barely getting by as a supply driver for a neighborhood diner the place his mom used to work. Within the early levels of GOAT, Dillihay spends an inordinate, and irritating, period of time on social media and grownup issues like monetary insecurity, each of that are distracting and really feel misplaced for a kids’s film.

However, someday on the road courtroom affectionately referred to as The Cage (suppose Rucker Park), Will finds himself difficult the league’s most smug participant, Mane (Aaron Pierre). A large horse with luscious hair, he instantly dismisses the “small” till he realizes that everybody within the crowd has their smartphone fixated on him, and the 2 play a recreation of 1-on-1 to three. Although Will (barely) loses, his associates Hannah and Daryl (Sherry Cola and Eduardo Franco, respectively), flip his recreation right into a spotlight reel that instantly goes viral.

The timing is auspicious. The Thorns finest participant, and arguably the best roarball participant of all time, Jett Filmore (Gabrielle Union), is having bother carrying the bottom-feeding crew by herself, and undoubtedly villainous, money-obsessed proprietor Flo (Jenifer Lewis) sees a chance to fulfill each her diva star participant and her pockets. Thus, an enormous splash is made when the crew indicators the unknown Will to an enormous league contract.

A lot of the movie’s second act performs like a thousand different sports activities movies, which could be tedious. It’s particularly so as a result of a lot of the ire that Jett feels in the direction of her new teammate feels decidedly unearned. The writers appear pulled between wanting to color her as a LeBron James-like celebrity and an Allen Iverson-like one-man-band. Her characterization is consistently contradicting itself. However, the opposite gamers are enjoyable and appreciably distinct.

Archie (David Harbour), a rhinoceros single father of two, is the crew’s bruising paint protector; Olivia (Nicola Coughlan) is an ostrich whose pace is simply matched by her love of glam; Lenny (mockingly performed by Curry), is an enormous giraffe whose journeyman profession has pushed him right into a aspect profession as a rap artist; and Modo Olachenko (Nick Kroll) is a Komodo Dragon within the personality-hire vein of Ron Artest or Dennis Rodman. Watching this band of misfits climb their approach into playoff competition is typical however deeply satisfying.

Kroll is particularly hilarious because the Russian-accented wildcard, however it’s the whole movie’s ethos round gender and sexuality that’s its most delightfully shocking facet. It is a sports activities league the place the perfect participant is a girl and the crew’s defensive specialist is clearly coded as bisexual, however by no means in a approach that would appear inappropriate inside a child’s movie. With out ever pointing to both state of affairs, Dilllihay makes the genuinely progressive implication that if ball is ball, then all belong, and that our courts and fields and rings shouldn’t be discriminatory. That is an particularly wanted message when queer, trans and non-white athletes are being villainized.

Which is in the end the stunning, if overly easy, message of GOAT. The best way through which a lot of the league and the media check with Will is harking back to the best way any trailblazer within the historical past of sports activities has been referred to. They attempt to outline him by what he lacks, or what is instantly recognizable about him, and he has to push ahead to show that he’s larger than meets the attention. It looks as if the sort of journey that Jett most likely needed to take herself, in a distinct movie.

Thus, GOAT hits dwelling. Or, in the event you want, it nails the buzzer-beater. The filming of the roarball scenes is electrical, the humor is foolish and candy, and the film is packed to the gills with inside basketball references: Michael Jordan’s Flu Sport in June 1997, Paul Pierce’s Wheelchair Sport in Sport 1 of the 2008 finals, and even the heartbreaking sale of the Seattle Sonics. It is an underdog story — sorry, under-goat story — for a brand new technology that’s prepared for a brand new, extra inclusive sort of recreation.

GOAT releases theatrically on February thirteenth, 2026.