How the Bold Look of ‘Goat’ Drew Inspiration From Basketball Cards

Sony Pictures Animation is a studio without a “house style.” You might be able to recognize a movie from another animation studio just by looking at it, but Sony gleefully eschews conventions and similarities. This is the studio that brought you “Hotel Transylvania,” “Surf’s Up,” the two “Spider-Verse” movies and “KPop Demon Hunters.” Expecting the unexpected is part of their brand.

The latest animated feature from Sony Pictures Animation is “Goat,” centering on Will (Caleb McLaughlin), a young goat who lives in an animal-filled world and dreams of becoming a Roar-ball star (this world’s equivalent of basketball and the NBA). The only problem is that smaller animals usually don’t play the sport and, if they do, they certainly don’t become the greatest of all time.

The look of “Goat” is a combination of high stylization and identifiable earthiness. Producer Michelle Raimo Kouyate said that the key word on the movie, both for the story and the visuals, was verisimilitude. The basketball sequences are kinetic and full of life, as the animals go from playing on two feet to four feet, climbing up walls and dunking the ball.

Production designer Jang Lee said, “We took our feature cues from live-action film, meaning the lighting and world physics are quite close to live-action film versus an animated movie. It’s a lot less cartoony, more realized, and so it’s more vivid, especially lighting. The overall texture and look of the picture is more closely associated with the live-action vibe.”

Lee said that they looked to the films of Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone for lighting cues, with the characters based on classic African American sculptures. They of course, looked at NBA players too – a Komodo dragon player, for instance, was based heavily on Dennis Rodman (particularly in his “Demolition Man” era for the San Antonio Spurs), according to art director Richard Daskas.

You can feel all of the influences in “Goat,” which, again, gives it a look and sensation all its own. That adventurousness is built into the DNA of the movie.

But perhaps the coolest flourish in “Goat” comes courtesy of the “impact” moments, which replicate the look and feel of a 1990s basketball card – with gold foil, holographic printing, even wear-and-tear on the screen.

“One of my biggest tasks was what we’re calling, internally, the impact cards. These were inspired by an idea that Adam Rosette, our co-director, had, where we could take key moments of the film and imbue them with the basketball card aesthetic,” explained Dylan Casano, a motion graphics designer and animator on “Goat.” “You probably noticed a couple of times where the full screen took over with a basketball card look like, with the holographics and all that stuff. That was all based on the nostalgia of having these shiny basketball cards.”

The process of creating the “impact cards,” Casano said, was something that the artists “never tried before here at Sony.” They first started by breaking down the cards – creating the individual pieces, like the holo-foil, the foil stamp lettering on the front and the bold, graphic patterns that would often embroider the cards.

The question became, according to Casano, How do we get the basketball card aesthetic and bring it into animation without taking away from it and keeping with the motion and all that fun stuff?

He flashed a moment from the movie where Will gets his own “rookie card” that takes up the whole screen during one of his first big games. “You’ll even notice on the upper right hand corner, he has the stats, and they’re not very high, because he’s a rookie,” said Casano.

Every character and card “has their own patterns, their own shines, their own everything,” said Casano. This was where they landed when it came to the impact cards.

“We wanted to take these moments in the film and make them collectors moments – like something that you would want to take a screenshot of and sell it for a lot of money,” Casano added.

Another example is when Will is playing a bear character named Grizz (voiced by Jelly Roll) on his local Roar-ball court. When he pulls off a particularly aggressive move against Will, with “gold being revealed through, like scratching the surface of the card and you can see gold underneath,” said Casano. “You can even see the outside of the card, wearing and getting wrinkled, because it’s almost as if his card isn’t worth very much and wasn’t taken good care of.”

Casano also showed off a moment with Oliva (Nicola Coughlan), an ostrich character on the Thorns (the team that Will eventually plays on). She has a big moment where she dunks on a character and it becomes a “posterized” flash.

“We got her name displayed surrounding her and with our super-fracture, Roar-ball look inside of the text, accompanied with emojis and messages, just to show her obsession with social media,” said Casano.

Later on in the movie, Will gets his more professional Roar-ball card.

“This one has a lot more of a streamlined design. This one has more Thorns official branding and split screens, fire everywhere, he’s lighting up. And on the right-hand side, you can see the stats, they’re much higher than before. He shows his progression of his skills throughout the film,” Casano explained. “Our main goal with these impact cards was to take these story beats and turn them into moments worth immortalizing, almost like the audience is seeing this legendary moment being printed in real time, right in front of their eyes.”

If the “Spider-Verse” movies were inspired by comic books, then “Goat” was inspired by basketball cards.

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