GOAT: Taking To The Court

G.O.A.T – An acronym often used in sports to praise a player or team. Short for “Greatest Of All Time”.

Example: “Jett Fillmore is the GOAT!”

It is also the name of Sony Pictures Animation’s most recent film.

GOAT is a 2026 CGI-animated movie set in a universe of anthropomorphic animals living in a world that mixes modern human tech with nature. It follows Will Harris, the young adult goat living in Vineland city, the home of the famous roarball team, the Vineland Thorns. Roarball takes the place of basketball in this world, where large animals violently compete on volatile courts to score points. Will looks up to the lead player of the Thorns, Jett Fillmore, a black panther, inspiring him to strive to play roarball professionally. Though when he grows up, he finds it near impossible due to his smaller size. But everything changes when he encounters the egotistic horse roarball player, Mane Attraction, challenging him to an eventful three point 1v1 game that earns Will the eye of the struggling Vineland Thorns.

I will preface that I am not very into sports, especially basketball. It just does not click with me. Which did not help the fact that I already didn’t have the highest hopes for this movie, expecting something tropey and simple. Enjoyable but simple. Only for me to be shocked by both the movie and the sports culture. 

Admittedly, I did have a very different experience with this movie compared to someone who is fully engrossed into that culture. But I still felt engaged by the movie and the sports culture in it, even if I missed some references that maybe others will pick up on their own watch. 

Minor warning, I will give minor spoilers for the movie. Nothing specific and nothing past the midpoint of the movie. But you’ve been warned.

The movie is dripping with basketball culture: the love of shoes, the language they use, the hometown loyalty, the rivalry — everything. Just look at the movie’s name! Even still, you won’t feel lost as someone (like me) who doesn’t fully understand everything with basketball. I mean, I picked up enough and enjoyed the movie to the point I wrote this article about it! Even just a basic knowledge will take you far, and you pick up plenty from just watching. But, if you are a basketball fan wrapped in that culture, you will feel perfectly at home.

This brings me to the film’s worldbuilding itself. Obviously, being a talking animal movie, GOAT is at least partially fantasy and comes with a world that follows its own rules. I speak as a creative writer when I say that getting your audience caught up on the world is a challenge. But also one that GOAT handles masterfully, giving as much as you need to know slowly and naturally. If it’s not crucial for the plot, the movie either doesn’t explain it or puts faith in the audience to put it together. They never explain that different animals are broken up into three size classes based on species (Bigs, Mediums, and Smalls), which, while not socially dividing species, does influence what activities and products they can effectively make use of. Instead of explaining such things, it puts faith that audiences will figure things out soon enough. 

But that finally brings us to characters, who are all stellar and the main draw for the movie, the supporting cast especially is dripping with personality and entertainment — Will’s komodo dragon teammate, Modo, or aardwolf best friend, Hannah, are utter highlights of the movie and steal the show even with limited screentime. But for the moment, I’ll limit it to 3 for now, Will, Jett, and Mane. 

Will is our main character, a young goat around 17-19. He basically represents the best parts of basketball/roarball, including the community the sport creates, the passion for the game, and good sportsmanship. He is an idealist, seeing the best in roarball even when repeatedly kicked down — which is both his greatest strength and what ends up doing the most good for the team. Will shines in how he positively affects others, making them grow for the better. But don’t think he lacks a personality, as he is loud and friendly, which makes you love him as much as the rest of the team grows to.

Meanwhile, the opposite of Will is the main antagonist, Mane Attraction. He is a horse and powerful player who has cemented himself as an MVP for his team, the Lava Court Magmas, winning two Claws – roarball’s highest championship award. He is basically everything bad about the sport, being egotistical, greedy, shallow, toxic, violent, and a bully. Basically, Mane Attraction is the type of person who would have bullied me into hating basketball as a kid. After being embarrassed by Will during a short 1v1 game near the start of the movie, Mane makes it his life’s goal to humiliate and break down Will on the grandest scale possible. He admittedly isn’t that complex, but he doesn’t need to be, as we have much more dynamic opposing forces throughout the movie, most notably in Jett Fillmore. 

Jett Fillmore is set up as one of the greatest roarball players and Will’s personal hero. She most notably has never won a Claw for her team, though, which prompts more and more scrutiny by fans and the people behind the scenes. Especially as they question her 10+ year career — one that she now feels might be nearing its end as she is repeatedly reminded of her age. IRL, many basketball players tend to age out and retire from playing professionally around their mid-30s, and with the intensity of roarball, players more directly fighting one another and competing on volatile courts, the stress the game puts on one’s body is all the more intense, implying that the average retirement age is even lower. And we know Jett is getting worn down, plagued by chronic back pain during the movie. 

All of this made me think that she would fall into one of two tropes. She could either have been a shining star on the horizon that Will would be chasing for the whole movie (and not really be a character of her own), or she could become a “Don’t Meet Your Heroes” type character. That’s an archetype we’ve seen before of the successful character who will do anything to keep their success and/or win, becoming a villain in the story and needing the main character to knock them down. But the movie surprises me as it sidesteps the trope.

All the stress from her career shows through as Jett actually becomes an antagonist for Will during a chunk of the movie, constantly pushing against his attempts to contribute to the team and treating him with hostility. But after the midpoint of the movie where she finally talks through some of her anxieties, the two find common ground and begin to heal in one of the best scenes in the movie. The specifics of which I won’t spoil, but definitely had me loving Jett after I started worrying she might become a full on villain. But instead Jett very much steals the show, being such an entertaining and sweet character. Something we can see from her first scene off the court before it is unfortunately buried under her stress and anxiety. 

I also cannot end this review without also talking about the anthropomorphic animal designs here. I could probably gush about artistic specifics down to how the spines are structured. But GOAT does an amazing job of anthropomorphizing these animal characters in a way that avoids the common pitfalls of them just feeling like humans with animal heads and a coat of fur. The whole cast are constantly shifting between moving two legs vs four and involving their bodies in ways humans can’t. Jett uses her tail constantly, Lenny controls the ball and stops people with his neck, Mane trots, Will uses his horizontal eyes, etc. Not to even mention the hair! 

I normally am not a big fan of hair slapped on anthropomorphic animal designs, but GOAT avoids that amazingly. The designs incorporate hair into the animals’ fur, down to giving it texture you don’t normally see in the animal to make it look more like human hair. Even animals that lack manes or such still have hair incorporated into their design very naturally. 

This has all been a long winded ramble about how impressive and rather surprising GOAT turned out to be. I went in not expecting much, especially after a personal string of media disappointments, but GOAT was my salvation, giving me something new. It certainly wasn’t groundbreaking, but it is a movie that manages to rise above many other animated movies in recent memory and sets a great pace for 2026.