To hit or not to hit? On the ball. That's the question. With a pause of two years after the world premiere, the British animated film Goal! is released, where almost Shakespearean issues are raised against the background of unconventional animation.
The Goal is the story of Mango Morrison, a young mole who is about to go to work as a miner, in his father’s mine. But Mango doesn’t really want to work in the mine: he dreams of becoming a professional footballer. He is a mole and cannot play football because of the bright light. All he has to do is live an underground life. But it's not all right here either. After a mysterious accident, the mine is on the verge of closing, and an insidious, gold-obsessed supervillain known as the "boss" tries to intimidate citizens. With the help of his reckless friends, Mango embarks on an epic adventure full of thrills, fun and danger.
First of all, “Goal!” attracts attention today’s non-trivial Stop Motion technology or, more simply, puppet animation (like “Escape from the Chickenhouse” in 2000). This is not through the computer Pixar and especially not colorful rainbow Disney. The drawing of the figures turned out to be specific (sometimes really funny), so that the species affiliation of the main and circumfloating characters is not always possible to determine immediately (the action takes place in the world of humanoid animals). Therefore, the author of dialogues, which neatly emphasize which family belongs to a particular hero, deserves a separate plus in karma.
In the portfolio of the creators of the cartoon about the adventures of the mole-footballer – British Gigglefish Animation Studios – except for this very “mole” so far, nothing else is listed. On the account of director Trevor Hardy one and a half tapes, including the reporting “Goal!” and one 10-minute short. Only the professionalism that fills the hand creates the main problem of the film. Designed visually for a younger age group with a declared rating of 6+, Goal! is not able to keep the main audience in the optical sight of the semantic message all the time. Between the abundance of scenes that primitively hit the forehead with the main idea from the poster, the twenty-fifth frame creeps passages that make inflated demands on the mental abilities of the children’s audience or prematurely reveal the secrets of being in the spirit of “grandfather frost does not exist.”
Characters that at the beginning of the retinue extoll the main character, by the final third splash their full potential and are small to typical functions like “comic con”, “smart” or “evil villain is evil because he is evil”, so that for all the achievements Mango becomes awkward because of a very low base of comparison.
On the other hand, 2020 was already a difficult year (and there will be another two weeks). So you should not additionally bother to search for archeme in the animated tape of beginner animators. It is better to sit back in a chair and just take it. And the answers to Shakespeare's questions let him look for the young mole Mango.
6 out of 10