There's nothing transformative about the simple message of Swapped

At this year’s Sundance, a documentary premiered about Jane Elliott, an Iowa schoolteacher whose “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” exercise in the 1970s helped teach white children what it was like to be discriminated against. Her lesson shares a moral with the glut of children’s media that revolves around magically breaking down the barriers that divide its characters—like those between hunter and bear or emperor and llama—so they can see how the other half lives: When you get right down to it, we’re all the same. Though the title of Netflix’s Swapped seems to promise the one-for-one Freaky Fridaying of its characters, it’s actually just one more animal-based transformation story aiming to make this well-worn point. Even if it wasn’t hot on the tail of Pixar’s Hoppers, Swapped would still be an overly familiar adventure towards empathy, one light on comedy and insight despite plenty of visual imagination in its world of flora-fauna hybrids.

This latter detail—that The Valley in which Swapped takes place is home to an ecosystem full of exotic plant-animal life like lilypad sting rays, sapling deer, and pinecone hedgehogs—is the most memorable element of the film, even if it’s led by recent Oscar winner Michael B. Jordan. Jordan voices Ollie the Pookoo, an island rodent with a tall tuft of Trolls-like hair, whose fuzzy little community has been driven underground by a flock of leaf-headed birds called Javans. The Pookoo are the only animals in Swapped without any botanical details on them, which wouldn’t be a problem except that, again, it’s really the main cool thing the film has going for it. 

We get our biggest dose of these critters in a record-scratch, freeze-frame, “Yep, that’s me” opening representative of storytellers who’ve quite visibly thrown in the towel. Director Nathan Greno (Tangled) at least steers Swapped towards a more animation-forward balance of plot and image than most films of this ilk, but the ensemble of screenwriters getting the characters from point A to B around the various lush locales of this tropical-colored biome fill the dead air with lifeless quips and slight characterization. Ollie’s thing is that he’s curious and precocious, a quality that dooms his people when he accidentally teaches one young Javan, Ivy (later voiced by Juno Temple), how to access the Valley’s food supply. Now aware that they can compete for the same meals, the invasive species of (much bigger) birds eat the Pookoo out of house and home. Will these two creatures ever be able to understand each other?

Well, maybe through the magic of walking a mile (or at least 90 minutes before credits) in each others’ fur/feathers, these competitors will learn to coexist! The literalized transformations at the heart of Swapped, enabled by rare glowing plant pods, are less about seeing things from someone else’s perspective and more about understanding that everyone’s perspective, ultimately, boils down to something shared and universal—something akin to the stereotypical observation that such-and-such culture uses food to bring people together and values family. They’re also not really played for laughs. There’s no body-hopping mania or delightfully delirious slapstick to be found in the animorphing premise; rather, when Ivy becomes a Pookoo and Ollie a Javan, there’s a lot of standing around, relying on stiff filler jokes to pass the time before the duo sets off on their quest to return to their rightful bodies. The closest Swapped gets to any kind of cleverness around its central premise is in small animation details, like how Ivy—in Pookoo form—cocks her little furry arms as if they’re still wings.