‘GOAT’ Is Beautifully Animated. Why Does It Feel So Soulless?

Since I saw GOAT last week, it’s inspired a very strange sort of crisis within me about the state of animated movies produced in the West.

It’s about as archetypal as sports stories go: an unlikely young sports player joins a team of prickly elders, but ends up warming their hearts for a chance to score glory. In this case, though, it’s told in a world of anthropomorphic animals where “talls” play roarball and “smalls” are destined to watch – at least, until young goat Will Harris challenges these conceptions, clashing with the LeBron-esque panther Jett Fillmore.

GOAT is, unlike its acronymic title may imply, perfectly fine. Its highs and lows are eminently predictable, the main character is distinctly uninteresting and it’s all paired with some fairly painful Hollywood children’s movie humour to boot and a LOT of product placement. Because of that, I would be perfectly willing to write off the film entirely if not for one fact: GOAT is a gorgeously animated film.

Developed at Sony Pictures Animation, who have been regularly pushing the boundaries of Western animation since Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, the movie simply has too much care put into it to fully discard. The locations its characters visit are rendered with stunning detail, and much of the actual sports fare in the movie is composed with a genuine sense of dynamism.

Eschewing the sort of Disney/Pixar house style that’s become emblematic of movies for young kids in recent years, it feels genuinely distinct from Zootopia in aesthetic and has a handful of sequences that are sincerely well-animated. But my question simply has to be… for what?

GOAT feels designed to distract, not provoke

This contrast between the care put into the film’s aesthetic versus the board room- approved vibe of every other element of GOAT is precisely why I’ve been soul searching so much in the past week. Why did I leave the theatre feeling so deflated after watching this totally middling if technically impressive film?

After much deliberation, I think I’ve finally put my finger on this feeling I’ve had for a while. GOAT, like many children’s films these days, doesn’t aim to have any staying power or enduring relevance to the people watching it.

It references several memes that date it substantially (side note: why do Hollywood execs find screaming goats so funny?? Someone has to do something about this), it features PlayStation 5s and Mercedes-Benz rendered with shocking levels of detail, and I feel like GOAT requires at least a working knowledge of the NBA to enjoy even a little bit.

I don’t necessarily have a problem with building off of pop culture, but it also just feels like a film made by following a laundry list of stuff execs want from a movie. A predictable plot? Check. A couple of kooky, random characters we can use for marketing? Done. Vague sentiments about “being yourself” that make it relatable to everyone without ever really discussing what that entails? Sure, we’ve got it.

Put in simpler terms, everything about GOAT except the animation is staggeringly dull, made to appeal to the lowest common denominators. I guess that’s fine, but I really do have to ask: is this the best we can expect from Western kids’ movies these days?

Can’t we expect more of Western animated films?

Acclaimed studios like Pixar and Disney have been putting out more stinkers than ever in recent years, each settling into a comfortable house style while gradually pumping out sequels that rake in the big bucks. I kinda liked Inside Out 2, but does it have the same staying power as Finding Nemo or WALL-E? Absolutely not!

So many animated films for children these days feel like content, not movies. To many parents, they don’t really care what their kids are watching – for many, it’s a way to distract them for a few hours with some pretty visuals and easy jokes, perhaps with the occasional quip for adults. Don’t get me wrong, I would vastly prefer this over letting the YouTube algorithm cook their brain – but don’t we want the next generation feeling artistically nourished?

Part of this is because animation is often viewed as a “lesser” form of cinema kept exclusively for children – an obviously untrue fact – but it needs to be paired with a similar level of creative ambition for the best results.

That’s not to say there aren’t great animated films being made, of course. The How To Train Your Dragon trilogy and things are going great internationally, particularly in the anime sphere in Japan and even in the independent sphere, such as with the phenomenal Oscar-winning Flow.

Yet these feel increasingly like the exception in Western movies, not the rule. Maybe GOAT depressed me so much because it’s the perfect median example: despite its visual splendour, it’s thoroughly without ambition. Worse than bad, it’s utterly forgettable – and if that’s what the average Western animated movie looks like nowadays, that can’t be healthy for the future of cinema and those who watch it.

GOAT is in cinemas now.