GOAT is what you would get if Space Jam and Zootopia and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse had a baby. That rather dismissive phrasing isn’t meant to belittle the movie, it’s just to establish the film’s vibe and to introduce its influences, both stylistic and thematic. However, the film’s most original element may be contained in a pronoun casually dropped in the introduction of one of the main characters, a superlative “roarball” (basketball) player who may just be the GOAT (greatest of all time).

Jett Filmore (voice of Gabrielle Union) is a panther who is nearing the end of a 15-year career at the top of the game, and she’s a she. When you first hear the young goat who idolises her, Will Harris (voice of Caleb McLaughlin), mention her and use the pronoun, you wonder if you’ve heard it correctly. On second mention, there can be no doubt. We’re so accustomed to professional athletes in movies being male – especially those idolised by young males – that we can’t imagine any other alternative, and we do a double take. GOAT imagines that alternative, which is one of its many credits.

Will is great with an outside shot; like the film’s producer, NBA superstar Steph Curry, he can’t miss. But there isn’t much of a chance he’ll ever go pro because a “small” can’t play professional roarball. The animals who fill out the current roster of the Vineland Thorns are all “bigs,” whether it’s rhinoceros Archie Everhardt (David Harbour), ostrich Olivia Burke (Nicola Coughlan), komodo dragon Modo Olochenko (Nick Kroll) or giraffe Lenny Williamson (Curry). The team’s owner, the warthog Flo Everson (Jenifer Lewis), sees an opportunity to turn around a losing season when she catches a viral video of Will “breaking the ankles” of one of the league’s other best players, the hothead and vainglorious horse Mane Attraction (Aaron Pierre), in a pickup game for money in a neighbourhood haunt called “the cage.”

Even though Jett has never won a “claw” (the league championship trophy) and her days may be numbered, she’s skeptical of any player brought in who hasn’t the size to help a roarball roster – not to mention anyone who could potentially draw focus from her. However, this could be their last chance to win, and not only because Jett’s days are numbered. The owner might have other ideas of what’s going to become of the team that has made faithfuls of all of Vineland’s citizens, including Will’s mother, who passed some years earlier.

You can probably tell there are some standard components to GOAT, but they are not rendered in standard ways. These ways weren’t known at all before Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse came along, injecting a jagged, funky aspect that breathed new life into a corner of the cinematic landscape in which Pixar and Dreamworks were trading blows, even though they weren’t all that different from one another. Sony Pictures Animation also took the world, or at least the world of teenage girls, by storm last year with K-Pop Demon Hunters, where the story was also a less important component of the whole experience than animation that felt freshly invigorating.

This is certainly not exactly Zootopia where these characters live, but they do exist alongside one another and have similar issue involving prejudging by their size or expected ferocity. GOAT just imagines a very street smart version of that, fueling itself with hip hop and with a sport that is virtually indistinguishable from the sport of basketball – unless you are looking at the courts on which they play. The Vineland home court is called the Greenhouse, and other than its earthen court, seems like a pretty stable place to play. But other courts involve ice or molten lava, unpredictably breaking apart during game action and changing the dynamics of the contest.

It’s details like this that show the full joy experienced by these animators as they do their thing, while also putting a viewer in mind of Space Jam. There are times when it all feels a little too frenetic and colourful, though that’s certainly preferable to the reheated materials we get elsewhere in the world of animation.

It’s also an environment where progressive agendas can thrive, as indicated by the league’s greatest player being conceived of as a woman – the sort of thing that gets fingers typing in 4CHAN groups the world over. Though of course the film’s association with primarily creatives of colour would do that anyway. By having not one but two female players out of the six on the team, GOAT basically does away with our old-fashioned notions of who can do what, without making too big of a fuss about it. It’s a scenario where a player’s species would be a much better predictor of game skill than their gender.

Sports movies present more challenges than any other genre when trying to reimagine one in a way we’ve never seen. And this is where GOAT has an ace up its sleeve. Even if who will come out on top, under what circumstances, and as a resolution to which character arcs, is never in doubt, at least each ensuing stylistic choice is a matter of some uncertainty. And when each answers that question with the sort of gnarled inspiration we get here, it’s an overall movie experience well worth celebrating.

 

GOAT opens in cinemas tomorrow.