Blending anime-inspired posing, mixed frame rates, and exaggerated animal-like movement pushed the character design team into new stylistic territory on Sony Pictures Animation’s action-packed animated comedy, now in theaters.
It’s one thing to create an animated film about basketball players. It’s another thing to animate a film that features anthropomorphic animal basketball players that move like human basketball players while also using their inherent animal abilities to excel at the game.
So, it stands to reason that character design was one of the main challenges on Sony Pictures Animation’s latest 3DCG feature film, GOAT.
“We had this gigantic, challenging movie with multiple characters, different species, and they had to go from moving on bipedal legs to quadruped legs in a hybrid basketball game,” shares head of character animation Daniel Pozo. “It seemed like a really big challenge to try and tackle. But when I first saw the character design of Jett Fillmore, the all-star black panther player, I fell in love with the movie immediately.”
GOAT, an original action-comedy set in an all-animal world, stars Caleb McLaughlin as Will Harris, a determined young goat who earns a shot at professional “Roarball,” a high-intensity, coed sport dominated by the fastest and fiercest animals in the league. Blending basketball culture, music, fashion and immersive animation, GOAT is the latest film from the studio behind Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and the artists who made KPop Demon Hunters.
Directed by Tyree Dillihay and co-directed by Adam Rosette, the film is produced by Michelle Raimo Kouyate, Rodney Rothman and Adam Rosenberg of Modern Magic, and Four-time NBA champion Stephen Curry and Erick Peyton of Unanimous Media. Rick Mischel and Fonda Snyder are executive producers; David Schulenburg and Keith Luczywo are co-producers.
Alongside McLaughlin, GOAT stars Gabrielle Union as Jett Fillmore, Nicola Coughlan as Olivia Burke, Nick Kroll as Modo Olachenko, David Harbour as Archie Everhardt, and Curry as Lenny Williamson. The voice cast also includes Aaron Pierre, Patton Oswalt, Jenifer Lewis, Jennifer Hudson, Jelly Roll, Ayesha Curry, Andrew Santino, Bobby Lee, Sherry Cola, and Eduardo Franco.
Check out the trailer:
“The character designs lent themselves to more of a playful approach,” notes Pozo, whose team used Unreal Engine and Maya for the animation. “It was something we talked about a lot, that we didn't want the characters to feel limited by the animation. We wanted them to be expressive and almost exaggerated because especially when we got to the basketball sequences, we weren’t limited by human capabilities. These are giant animals. They have tails, horns, and different aspects that we could lean into.”
All varieties of animals – from horses and tigers to giraffes, ostriches, rhinos, and even Komodo dragons – compete on teams in Roarball. The game is played much like basketball, but it also takes place in a variety of court environments, or biomes: from ice and lava to jungle and deserts. The wide variety of differently sized creatures and camera angles certainly sold the drama and upped the entertainment value of the film. But the diverse set of characters led to another challenge: scale.
“Scale was definitely a concern at the beginning,” says Pozo. “How was the cinematography department going to shoot a five-foot-tall goat next to a 10-foot-tall giraffe? That was one thing to figure out. But maintaining proper scale throughout the movie was something that we always kept a very strong eye on because we wanted Will to feel like the main character. We wanted him to feel like he was very small among very, very large characters. So, any time the scale difference between characters started to feel too similar, we would scale the large character up and the smaller character down to keep it exaggerated. We had a tolerance of adjusting scale about 10% each way, just so that it wouldn't affect any of the cloth or hair simulations in the animation. We just kept an eye on it and, honestly, leaned into the dramatic differences.”
That also included differences in the animal players’ natural abilities.
“Once we established how specific we were going to be matching our reference of the mechanics of basketball, then it was about giving the animators this whole new toolbox to play with,” shares Pozo. “We’d brainstorm, ‘What if Will, as a goat, used his head to block and ram into other goats during the game?’ and things like that. Those conversations started to come out and then we just let the animators surprise us. It was a lot about what was the most unexpected approach to the performances that also took into account the locomotion mechanics.”
NBA player Andre Iguodala served as a consultant on GOAT’s production to help establish the film’s game plays and, in Pozo’s words, “eliminate guesswork” for the filmmakers who were less familiar with the typical movements of basketball players on a court.
“He was so happy to be involved and was extremely hyped up to be there,” shares Pozo about Iguodala’s time on the production. “He had a lot of fun with it, showing us with figurines where the players should be. We provided that to the layout department and they did a very quick kind of chess piece move with a wide-angle lens, establishing where everyone was moving on the court. And with animation, we were able to provide a higher fidelity version of those moves. We had run cycles that would travel across the court in a very established amount of time. So, we weren't cheating on anything. And the animators we put on that were extremely talented with action and timing and creating the shot.
He adds, “That whole process was such a success, in my opinion, because it allowed us to show everybody the high dynamic, Ford versus Ferrari race car approach that we wanted to establish in this movie, and we knew exactly what to do once it came back to animation. We just needed to make it look even prettier, take all those anime influences, and just exaggerate it and have fun.”
But not too much fun.
“We weren't going to be breaking physics with this film,” notes Pozo. “We didn't want to lean into a Looney Tunes version of basketball. We wanted to appeal to the basketball nerds out there who would be hyper focused on all the details and get them to notice that we also love this sport.”
While the Spider-Verse films and KPop Demon Hunters were big influences on the direction of GOAT’s acrylic and painterly visual style, and though Formula 1 racing provided the energy the animators were going for, the directors’ insistence on no motion blur forced GOAT’s team to push innovation in a way Sony teams hadn’t yet tried.
“One of the first things the directors mentioned was that there was not going to be any motion blur in this movie,” notes Pozo. “They didn’t want it. So, we started talking about this mixed frame rate approach to the movie. It wasn't going to be just on twos like Spider-Verse and KPop Demon Hunters, but it would be a fun take of ones and twos. The directors were very much on board with going not just on ones and twos, but also on threes and fours at certain points. We got very experimental with this, but nothing was an arbitrary choice. The artists had to choose which information that they wanted to highlight on the screen at which sequences and then set the frame rates based on that.”
For this, animators referenced Sakuga anime style, which focuses on “catching the eye” of the viewer with dynamic and artistic visuals. “There’s an emphasis on really strong, dynamic poses with long, strong lines of actions and very defined, exaggerated arms and legs,” explains Pozo. “That's where the mixed frame rates really thrived because we were able to pick and choose which pose we wanted to exaggerate or hold for a little bit longer. It also helped the movie feel more textural and sophisticated.”
There were also bits of classical painting references in the film as well.
“There's this shot at the end of the movie where Jett is injured in the final game play, and she launches herself towards the ball,” says Pozo. “The directors wanted to approach it like a Caravaggio composition of all the characters with the foreground versus the mid-ground and background. This triangle composition of Jet launching towards the ball with everyone’s focus on her looks like a painting that would be in the Louvre. The first time I saw it come together, with the music and everything, I got emotional. I hope I get to have that shot on my wall someday.”
Pozo says, in addition to the big wow-factor moments, there are small details in the film that make the movie worth watching more than once. “There are some Easter eggs from other Sony movies in the film,” he shares. “There’s the moose sculpture from The Mitchells vs. the Machines and the Ecto-1 from Ghostbusters. There’s definitely a lot of love for the other movies Sony has made over the years hidden in this film.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
