GOAT is an underdog story about anthropomorphic animals playing basketball. And it’s about a goat, as a play on the Greatest Of All Time acronym. On paper, there’s no way this should be anything remarkable. But after the Spider-Verse films and K-Pop Demon Hunters, I know better than to question Sony Pictures Animation. So let’s take a closer look, shall we?

We lay our scene in Vineland, a forested place coded as the ghetto of the animal world. This was the birthplace of roarball, a sport resembling basketball, but it’s played by animals on dangerously unstable courts built around environmental hazards. I might add that it’s a particularly brutal sport, with frustratingly inconsistent rules about what constitutes a foul. (Even by the standards of nonfictional sports.)

In the professional roarball league, Vineland is represented by the Vineland Thorns, which is in turn spearheaded by the panther Jett Fillmore (Gabrielle Union). She’s a world-famous all-star, arguably the greatest player in the history of the sport. This despite the fact that she’s never won a championship, and there are serious mounting questions as to whether she can bring home a championship trophy with this team before she’s too old to keep playing at this level.

(Side note: As a lifelong Portlander, this hits me right where I live. If you know anything about Damian Lillard and the Blazers, you know what I’m talking about. I might add that the logo for the Vineland Thorns looks suspiciously like the logo for the Portland Thorns, our women’s soccer team. I had to look it up, and I can’t confirm that anyone involved with this movie has any Stumptown connection.)

The bottom line is that Vineland is losing patience quickly, and Jett is at the end of her rope. Trouble is, the team owner (Flo Everson, a boar voiced by Jenifer Lewis) doesn’t really care about the team, the game, or the town so much as she cares about finding a player who will get tails in seats at minimal cost.

Enter Will, our eponymous goat, voiced by Caleb McLaughlin. He’s an orphaned down-on-his-luck teenager who grew up idolizing the Thorns, most especially Jett. Will is a bully target because of his size, but he’s got legitimate talent. As a prey animal (or “a small”, in the parlance of the culture), Will has a much broader field of vision than the predator animals that typically play the sport. Couple this with so many years of obsessively studying and practicing roarball, and Will is uniquely capable of strategizing plays while also using his small size for maneuverability. Sure, he has a tough time shooting over bigger opponents, but it’s nothing but net when he gets a clear shot.

Long story short, Will crosses paths with the stallion Mane Attraction (Aaron Pierre), the roarball celebrity who’s our primary bullying antagonist for the film. Will gets trounced in an exhibition match, but he makes enough of a splash to go viral. (Yes, cell phones and social media are a thing in this universe.) Flo takes notice of the upstart to desperate and naive to care whether he gets paid or killed in a roarball court, so Will gets signed to the Vineland Thorns. It doesn’t go well.

Our protagonist has a straightforward development arc. Will is an underdog that nobody takes seriously no matter how good he is, and nobody gives him a chance, until he finally pushes through hard enough and long enough to get a lucky break. At which point he turns everything around for his town and his team until things hit a nadir at the climax and then Will rallies everyone to win the championship. Boilerplate feel-good sports cinema trifle we’ve all seen a million times before. Luckily, McLaughlin and the animators imbue Will with more than enough charisma and pathos to effectively sell it.

More importantly, Will is there to power a far more engaging and dynamic character arc.

Jett is an aging athlete who stubbornly refuses to admit that she’s washed up. She’s focused on winning the championship, to the exclusion of all else. And however talented Jett was and is, her pride is holding herself and everyone back in ways she can’t accept. Consider her teammates.

• Dennis (a monkey voiced by Patton Oswalt) is the overly neurotic head coach, little more than a glorified clipboard holder. Those are his words, not mine.
• Archie (a rhino voiced by David Harbour) is a burned-out basket case because his two daughters (both voiced by six-year-old rapper VanVan) are unholy terrors.
• Olivia (an ostrich voiced by Nicola Coughlin) was a first-round draft pick, but her mind and soul have been crushed by social media.
• Lenny (a giraffe voiced by Producer Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors) is more focused on his rap career.
• Modo (a Komodo dragon voiced by Nick Kroll) is an unhinged psychopath.

(Side note: Keep an ear out for Kevin Love, Dwayne Wade, Angel Reese, A’ja Wilson, and Andre Iguodala, all professional basketball players who cameo as various roarball players and refs.)

They are all thoroughly useless because Jett has made them useless. She’s pushed all of them aside so that she can claim all the glory for herself. Contrast that with Will, who sees the value in all of them, even if nobody on the team sees any value in him. But when Will finally proves himself, when this tiny little goat proves that he has a place on the court, it proves that anyone else potentially could as well. I might add that Jett has to figure out eventually that roarball is a team sport, whether she has to learn it the easy way or the hard way.

Even more importantly, Jett’s gotten so wrapped up in the pursuit of the Cup (or the Claw, as it’s called in-universe) that it’s become an end in itself. Jett wants to be the Greatest Of All Time, but she’s forgotten what that really means. Will is there to remind her.

Will grew up idolizing Jett. She was the reason Will wanted to get into roarball, Jett was everything Will ever wanted to be. And Jett doesn’t want anything to do with him. She is pathologically afraid of passing the torch to him or anyone else. What he understands — and she doesn’t — is that inspiring others is what it really means to be the greatest. There will be another championship team in a year. But the Greatest Of All Time literally means inspiring other generations of athletes, and that will literally last for all time.

Whether it’s because of greed (in Flo’s case), pride (Jett), or obsessive self-pity (the entire team), everyone on the Vineland Thorns has lost sight of their place in the city. But Will knows. He grew up in hometown pride and sports fandom. He knows what it means for the poor and scrappy underdogs of Vineland to have someone to look up to and something to chase after. He knows what it means for a team of champions to show that their city is worth fighting for.

As I’ve said before, this is all standard boilerplate inspirational sports fare. But in the hands of these filmmakers, it’s all done superbly well. There are still some pretty big drawbacks, though.

First of all, the third act plot twist is bullshit. I know it’s all part of the formula and we needed some reason for the team to be at their lowest point, but that whole angle was transparent bullshit from start to finish.

Secondly, we’ve got a couple of sports commentators voiced by Andrew Santino and Bobby Lee. Their schtick didn’t work. I get how their interplay might’ve looked good on paper, but the whole comic relief bit fell totally flat.

But of course the big one is the setting. Yes, the anthropomorphic animal setting gives the whole movie a distinct visual flavor that makes this otherwise cookie-cutter sports movie into something unique and more kid-friendly. Even so, it invites unfavorable comparisons with Zootopia, especially since Zootopia 2 is still playing in some theaters (including the one where I saw this). Sorry, but the Zootopia franchise features better world-building, better sight gags, better research into the various animals, and overall makes far better use of the premise. Sure, GOAT is way more exciting and attractive to watch, but the Zootopia films have a lot more going on under the surface.

Overall, GOAT is fine. It’s a feel-good sports story that’s funny and flashy and thoughtful enough to keep the kids entertained, with only barely enough creativity to keep the adults engaged. It doesn’t do much of anything new — even the animal motif has been done better by other films — but what it does, it does right.

The film hardly compares with the best of Sony Pictures Animation’s recent output, but it’s hardly a bomb, either. If Enter the Spider-Verse was Toy Story 2 and The Emoji Movie was The Good Dinosaur, GOAT would rank somewhere around Onward.

It’s a film that gets by on charm and heart, and heart is easily the most important part of any sports film. This one’s an easy recommendation for anyone with young kids, and it’s at least worth a home video viewing for anyone else.