Movie Thoughts: GOAT (2026)

• Released: February 11th, 2026
• Directed by: Tyree Dillihay, Adam Rosette
• Running time: 1h 40min
• Rating 3.5/5

Synopsis

A goat dreams of making it big in a sport called roarball. He gets the chance to join the team of his idols, but now has to prove himself to the entire world of roalball, being the only smaller-sized player of the game.

My Thoughts

I have a history of legit not caring about sports or sports movies. Not that I can't appreciate a movie that has sport elements in it, but when a movie is directly about a sport I usually kinda mentally check out. So while I was looking forward to this film because of the great-looking animation, I was a bit hesitant about the fact that sport does feature heavily in it.

But thankfully, despite the sports aspect, I quite enjoyed this movie. The main cause for that is simple though: The characters are pretty darn likable. Sure, maybe not the most complex characters, but I found them to all be pretty neat and charming in a way. Especially Will and his roarball team were just neat characters. The standout among them is Jett, Will's idol who is starting to near the end of her career but is not willing to lose because of this. She had a lot of good character development. Will himself is a bit more on the generic side, but he's still likable and you do root for him. And it's nice to see him change the roarball sport for the better. One of my other favorite characters is Modo, he's an obvious comic relief but he just worked for me. He was legit funny, which is something I can rarely say about comic relief characters in animated movies (usually I find those annoying and unfunny).

The animation also deserves a shout-out, because man, this look great. It's got that kinda Spiderverse-y stylistic low-framerate animation, but even aside of that this is just a very well-animated film. Especially the roarball action scenes are the highlights of the film. 

The character design is also overall really good...with one exception. I think that Flo looks a bit too weird and uncanny. She's a boar, but she has pretty human-y features with a relatively flat face (real life wild boars have huge long muzzles) and a kind of human-ish mouth. Her tusks also don't seem to be attached to anything as they move loosely in her mouth when she talks, which is odd because obviously those are her fangs and thus should be embedded into her skull. Ergo they don't move loosely when she talks. Most of the designs outside of her are great though. But I do have to say that they do sometimes look awkward when they go on four legs and start moving more animal-like. Their anatomy is kinda too human for that, at least in some cases like with Mane. 

There's also a few gross-out jokes here which I didn't care for. And there's also a few "jokes" where the main characters poke fun at Mane's mane, which feels, I don't know, off. He has an afro when his hair is not braided, so essentially they are poking fun of people with that hair texture here, which I don't like. 

But aside from those few flaws, yes, this is a solid movie. Not great, but pretty dang good.