‘SWAPPED’ Is a Pretty Bird That Settles With Just Flapping Around

There’s a special kind of obnoxious nothingness to the way people talk about “world peace.” Not the wanting of it. Wanting world peace is fine, obviously. It’s the framing that gets under the skin: the tiara-and-sash simple-mindedness of it, the idea that wishing hard enough into a microphone counts as a position. Same goes for the phrase “why can’t we all just get along,” which at this point is less a sentiment than a post-Trump boomer tic, a way of gesturing vaguely at division without ever having to name what’s doing the dividing. Weirdly heavy way to open a review of a Netflix animated kids movie, I know, but Swapped is guilty of doing pretty much exactly this.

The film produced by Skydance from director Nathan Greno (Tangled) looks great but that’s about it. The wonder’s missing, the performances are flat, and the whole quivering lip, teary-eyed messagings of Swapped lands with the rehearsed sincerity of a contestant who’s just been handed the mic and asked what she’d wish for, if she could wish for anything at all.

Swapped tells the story of Ollie, voiced by Michael B. Jordan, a small woodland critter known as a Pookoo (basically a pika/otter mash-up) who lives in a mystical but mostly boring land known as the Valley. Long ago, this place was inhabited by strange mystical creatures, hybrids of flora and fauna, stunningly designed and tilted toward a mystique the film never manages to capitalize on. Nowadays, though, it’s mostly just a staging ground for a battle over limited resources, with the Pookoo and kākāpō birds fighting for every last scrap of food.

A curious critter, Ollie spends his days inventing ways to compensate for his physical limitations. Can’t breathe underwater? Invent a snorkel. Kākāpō eating all your food? Blind them with reflections. But when Ollie tangles with one particularly bold kākāpō named Ivy, voiced by Juno Temple, the two accidentally trigger an ancient magic that causes each to inhabit the other’s body.

The message leans toward that old adage about walking a day in someone else’s shoes — or, in this case, paws — but Swapped doesn’t do anything especially interesting with that premise. Its themes of understanding the plight of others, coming together, and finding strength through empathy are clear enough, but clarity isn’t the same thing as insight. The film keeps nudging toward profundity without ever doing the work to earn it.

[READ MORE: Our review of ‘Zootopia 2‘ directed by Jared Bush and Byron Howard and starring Jason Bateman]

That’s frustrating because the visual imagination is there. The magical land is filled with plant-animal hybrids and odd little flourishes that suggest a richer, stranger movie lurking just offscreen. But the world feels curiously flat, lacking both wonder and emotional texture. It’s visually inventive in isolated bursts, but narratively inoffensive and bland; the kind of animated film that keeps gestures toward the idea of enchantment without ever becoming actually enchanting.

The voice cast is where Swapped starts to show its seams. Michael B. Jordan is a commanding screen presence, but stripped of his physicality, he doesn’t quite translate into this particular register. His voice never disappears into Ollie; it remains stubbornly, distractingly Michael B. Jordan, which becomes a problem when he’s supposed to be inhabiting a tiny imaginary woodland critter. Juno Temple fares better as Ivy, finding a little more snap, emotion, and personality in the role, but even she’s fighting against a movie that rarely gives its performers anything specific or strange to grab onto. Tracy Morgan also turns up as a mostly entertaining fish-creature named Boogle, and he is, unsurprisingly, even harder to divorce from the sound of Tracy Morgan doing Tracy Morgan. That can be charming in the right context, but here it only adds to the feeling that you’re listening to actors in a recording booth rather than characters living inside a fully realized world.

That sense of distance matters because Swapped never really transports you into its reality. The dialogue from writers John Whittington, Christian Magalhaes, and Robert Snow is extremely boilerplate – if it feels like you’ve heard these exact same lines a hundred times before, it’s because you probably have; the jokes rarely land; and the emotional beats arrive with the deadened predictability of someone checking boxes on a children’s movie empathy worksheet. For what it’s worth, my three-year-old daughter was not especially transfixed, which feels like useful data when assessing a brightly colored Netflix animated film about magical critters switching bodies. I may have chuckled once or twice, mostly out of parental obligation. And while my kiddo promptly declared Swapped “good,” I doubt she’ll be demanding a return trip to the Valley anytime soon. I’ll check again once the big screen, popcorn, and shiny colors have worn off, but I suspect she won’t be swapping out any of her mainstays for this  pretty but algorithmic shrug of a flick.

CONCLUSION: ‘Freaky Friday’ by way of ‘Strange World’, Nathan Greno’s ‘Swapped’ is at its best when none of its characters are talking. Visually imaginative but emotionally underpowered, it’s a mostly inoffensive, largely algorithmic animated flick that even Michael B. Jordan and Juno Temple can’t charm into having a personality.

C

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