\n\tFor a decade, maybe more, the animated look and aesthetic established by \u201cToy Story\u201d in 1995 gave the Pixar movies their eye-popping surface wonder. What we quickly came to think of as the Pixar house style totally ruled \u2014 as digitally animated artistry, and as commerce. So it was no big surprise to see that it spread. In essence, the Pixar style, that tactile bubble sheen of reality, became the mode of all mainstream Hollywood studio animation. And when then happened, it ceased to be exciting. There were still many good animated features, but the look and feel of them became standard, comparable to how the hand-drawn animated aesthetic of Walt Disney, so glorious in the era of \u201cSnow White and the Seven Dwarfs\u201d and \u201cPinocchio\u201d and \u201cFantasia\u201d and \u201cBambi,\u201d came to seem less magical in the age of \u201cCinderella\u201d and \u201cPeter Pan.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tAll of which makes \u201cGOAT<\/a>\u201d a vibrant surprise. It\u2019s a highly original and rousing animated feature \u2014\u00a0a sports fable with a hip-hop vibe and an off-kilter cosmology. It doesn\u2019t look or move like other animated features. I liked \u201cZootopia 2\u201d just fine, but in tone and visual imagination it was the definition of standard. \u201cGOAT,\u201d however, takes place in a demimonde of its own devising, a city called Vineland that\u2019s envisioned with a painterly sensuality that lures the audience in. It\u2019s almost a dystopia \u2014\u00a0a crumbling animal kingdom populated by critters of every stripe, with vines hanging in unruly abundance, often draped over the infrastructure. And that image of life poking up between the cracks of decay extends to the settings: the dingy living rooms, or a basketball court surrounded by a ratty chain-link face, with rusty backboards and metal nets (it\u2019s known as the Cage, and treated as the neighborhood Thunderdome). At the same time, the film\u2019s backdrops are vibrant in a nearly Impressionist way. Some of them look like they could have been painted by C\u00e9zanne.<\/p>\n \n\tThe lush laidback dystopia of \u201cGOAT\u201d is bracing because it feels so novel, and inviting because it feels like home. And that\u2019s part of what makes the movie, directed by Tyree Dillihay (with Adam Rosette as co-director), a go-for-your-dream fairy tale that we haven\u2019t seen before. The game played in these settings isn\u2019t basketball \u2014 it\u2019s called roarball, and it\u2019s a mangy, brutal, hyper-fast version of basketball, a reckless high-flying team gladiator match with hoops. We meet the film\u2019s hero, Will Harris (Caleb McLaughlin<\/a>), when he\u2019s a young Boer goat, a junior sports fanatic who gets taken by his single mother to see the Vineland team, the Thorns, at the Green House, the local roarball colosseum. Will and his mom don\u2019t have much money, but he manages to get in to watch his idol, Jett Fillmore, a towering panther voiced by Gabrielle Union<\/a> is the most vivid piece of animation acting I\u2019ve encountered in quite some time. Her Jett is a champion, full of bluster, always throwing shade, like Caitlin Clark infused with the spirit of RuPaul. But she\u2019s got vulnerabilities that round the character right out to three dimensions.<\/p>\n \n\tTen years after the prologue, we meet Will as a grown-up goat doing deliveries for the Whisker Diner, but he\u2019s on the verge of being evicted from his apartment. He still dreams of being a roarball star (he\u2019s an ace shooter who can drop a swish at 50 feet), but he\u2019s\u2026a goat. Which means that he\u2019s a \u201csmall,\u201d according to the Vineland caste system. How can a small compete in a world of oversize jock beasts?<\/p>\n \n\tThe members of the Thorns are all gigantic, and when Will goes to shoot hoops by himself at the Cage, he runs into Mane Attraction (Aaron Pierre), a dredlocked Andalusion horse from a rival team who\u2019s pure gangsta. Mane challenges Will to a round of one-and-one and basically smashes him. But Will gets off a few good shots, which are captured on a phone camera, and when his buddy creates a viral video, making it look like Will trounced Mane in the duel, it attracts the attention of Flo (voiced by a super-sly Jenifer Lewis), the warthog hustler owner of the Thorns, who needs something to revitalize her team. Jett, her veteran superstar, is getting old; the other players are dispirited. Maybe an injection of goat energy is just what they need.<\/p>\n \n\tIn outline, \u201cGOAT\u201d doesn\u2019t do anything terribly unorthodox, but the joy of the film lies in its dreamscape design, in the funky cut and thrust of its patter, and in its touching off-center sincerity. The different roarball stadiums are like fantasy landscapes (in one the game floor is built over bubbling magma, in another it\u2019s made of ice), and though Will\u2019s teammates may sound like the usual menagerie of animated critters, Tyree Dillihay, directing his first feature, gives each of them little curlicues of insanity that pop, whether it\u2019s Olivia (Nicola Coughlan), the ostrich, burying her head in the earth to express her despair, or the way that Modo (Nick Kroll), the team\u2019s anarchic Komodo dragon, with his pierced nose and tongue and Cookie Monster-on-fire personality, has jaws drenched in saliva.<\/p>\n \n\tWill starts off on the sidelines, but part of what\u2019s cool about the film is that even when he comes off the bench, he isn\u2019t transformed into some unreal champion. Despite the pun of the title, this goat doesn\u2019t become the GOAT. What he does do is bring the team back its soul. (So does Lenny the giraffe\u2019s delicate cover version of \u201cDon\u2019t Dream It\u2019s Over.\u201d) Caleb McLaughlin, from \u201cStranger Things,\u201d plays Will with the kind of quick-witted empathic vocal performance that recalls Shameik Moore\u2019s vibrance in the \u201cSpider-Verse\u201d films. And while \u201cGOAT,\u201d as a movie, isn\u2019t as inventive as they are, it has a touch of that \u201cSpider-Verse\u201d DNA \u2014\u00a0the flash and eagerness and talent to elevate digital entertainment into a form of re-animation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For a decade, maybe more, the animated look and aesthetic established by \u201cToy Story\u201d in 1995 gave the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":464172,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,189584,48,75,51763,47192,337],"class_list":["post-464171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-caleb-mclaughlin","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-gabrielle-union","tag-goat","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=464171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464171\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/464172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=464171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=464171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=464171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}