Goat

I'm not sure whether this movie's title is Goat, as in "its main character is an anthropomorphic goat," or GOAT, as in "Greatest Of All Time." The movie plays with this equivocation quite a bit. Apparently based (loosely, I'm sure) on the story of basketball star Steph Curry, it tells the story of a small goat named Will from the mean streets of Vineland who has dreamed since childhood of playing professional roarball, which is kind of an extreme sports version of basketball. Ordinarily, he would have no chance. Fortunately for him, the Vineland Thorns have a cheapskate owner who doesn't really care if her team wins or loses, headlined by a panther named Jett who habitually hogs the ball, plays like the rest of her team isn't there, and is determined to win a Claw (the league championship) before age and injury end her career. Ultimately, Will owes the fact that he makes the hometown team to a viral video of him playing one-on-one with a tough, stallion pro named Mane. Signal a season of roarball action featuring quirky characters of varying species, gradually coming together as a real team and giving both Jett and Will a real shot at sports immortality.

The basketball, um, I mean roarball, scenes are fun, to be sure. But the heart of the movie is grounded in Will's persistent pursuit of his seemingly impossible dream, which ties into his tireless campaign of chipping through the armor Jett has built up around herself and injecting spirit into a team that has all but given up on themselves. A major audio-visual theme that contributes a lot to the texture of this movie is its hyperawareness of sports media and social media, like a mash-up of ESPN and Animal Planet where everybody has their phone out and is live-streaming footage for later editing as Instagram reels. It's glitzy and frenetic and loud, with color commentators putting in their bit, dramatizing the team's buildup to their big shot at the Claw and the final showdown with Mane and his team of bigger, badder animal jocks.

I'm not much of a sports watcher, but I am always up for a sports movie. They usually hit the target, from a storytelling and emotional standpoint, and this Sony Animation Studios picture is no exception – though the "glitzy and frenetic and loud" pushed the limits of what my nerves could absorb. I am also, don't forget, a guy who could never be persuaded to see a "Fast and Furious" movie after the first one gave me a splitting headache. The laughs, the characters and relationships, the emotional rewards of the story kept my butt in the seat where a movie that failed to deliver on these points might have seen me walk out before the end. So, kudos for that.

Scanning through the cast for actors whose names mean anything to me, I see Gabrielle Union (Bring It On) played Jett. David Harbour (Stranger Things; 2019's Hellboy) voiced Archie the rhino. Frequent voice actor Nick Kroll (Sing, Captain Underpants, etc.) plays Modo, the bizarre Komodo dragon. Steph Curry himself voiced Lenny the giraffe. Playing the team's warthog owner, Flo, is Jenifer Lewis, who also voiced a character named Flo in the Cars movies. Wayne Knight of "Hello, Newman" fame (cf. Seinfeld) plays Frank, Will's gerbil landlord. A bunch of pro basketball players, male and female, also show up in the cast list. And Patton Oswalt puts in the role of Coach Dennis, a monkey with a huge schnoz.

Three Scenes That Made It For Me: (1) Upon learning that Flo has hired a goat to be the team's sixth player, Jett threatens to eat Will – a threat he takes seriously. It's a reminder that in a version of the present-day world filled with anthropmorphic animals, there's a limit to how anthropically they morphize. On a similarly diet-related note, whenever Will feels peckish, he takes a bite out of a tin can – even provoking Jett to remind him that there's food inside the can. (2) Just about any scene featuring Frank and his ridiculously numerous offspring. The poor guy is stressed by having so many mouths to feed, and yet at the outcome of the Thorns' drive to compete for the Crown, he declares that he feels like having another dozen kids! (3) The fallout when Jett, sensing that her dream of winning a Claw may be about to slip out of her grasp, suddenly loses the faith she has started to have toward her team – basically the final crisis of the story, apart from the championship-level gameplay.