Kid’s movies are often fairly rudimentary in terms of plot, but the truly great ones find ways to tell a story that everyone can recognize and make it feel fresh and new. Goat is not exactly such a picture. The story is predictable to the point of plodding, and there are a handful of jokes that are “for the adults” that don’t mesh with the work being put forward on the screen. But the style that Sony Pictures Animation team has been able to pour into a movie about a goat playing basketball is deserving of a lot of credit.

Goat is about Will Harris (Caleb McLaughlin), a young goat who lives in a world of talking animals, which if Zootopia 2 is to be believed, is a recipe for box office success. He has always wanted to play Roarball (basketball) and is encouraged by his mother to pursue that dream from a young age. Cut to Will living by himself working as a delivery boy at a diner. He is regularly told “smalls can’t ball” by other larger animals, but gets a shot to be on his local professional Roarball team after a viral video of him playing one on one with one of the stars of the sport.

You can probably guess where most of this story goes. As I said there’s not a lot to the bones of the story, but the world that the animators create for their animal characters is genuinely exciting to look at. Zootopia is a brightly colored land of 3D animation, but Goat blends what look like water color painting backdrops of forest, city, and mountain with their animation to create screens that look like works of art. Their animation style has become a thumb print, the movement of their characters seem to be running at 20 frames per second as opposed to the 24FPS that almost all films move at. Blending more classic art styles with what feels like a more rudimentary frame frate gives their films an elegance all their own.

The other thing that helps Goat rise above its paint by numbers story is the genuinely impressive voice work. Stranger Things alum Caleb McLaughlin brings Will to life with his line deliveries, and Gabriel Union as the next lead is fantastic, playing Roarball legend, a panther named Jett Fillmore. The whole cast brought their A games to the booth, from Jennifer Lewis, Patton Oswalt, Steph Curry, Nicola Coughlan, David Harbour, and of course, the other main standout, Nick Kroll voicing a frighteningly unhinged lizard named Modo Olachenko. All of his jokes got the biggest laughs, and they were all well deserved. It’s nice to see an animated movie cast people with a passion for voice acting and character work as opposed to the biggest movie stars they can get.

There are a few odd choices in terms of product placement that were baffling for a kid’s movie. Primarily a zoomed in image of a Mercedes Benz logo as a car goes whipping down the animals version of an interstate that I can’t imagine even the current Department of Transportation ever approving of. Product placement usually doesn’t offend me too much, but I can’t imagine the person watching an animated film about a small goat playing basketball and deciding to buy a car. There were a couple others, a PS5 is animated into the world, and the jerseys they wear are donned with the Under Armour logo. At least the latter two make sense more in terms of target audience, and less centered on than the Mercedes logo was. But what do I know, maybe Goat’s success will move more cars than I think it will?

3/5