When you hear the phrase “body-swap comedy,” you tend to think of complications. A good entry in the genre, like “13 Going on 30” or “All of Me,” can involve so much personality juggling that it becomes a heady experience. That was true, in its way, of “Hoppers,” the recent Pixar film in which a skate-punk college kid found herself in the body of a beaver who was actually a robot avatar. “Swapped,” a Netflix critter comedy that involves a fair amount of body switching, never approaches that level of complication. This one, by design, feels tailored to an extremely young audience. But that isn’t a backhanded insult. On the story level, “Swapped” is simple to a fault, yet there’s a surprise enchantment to it — it’s a woodland fairy tale for seven-year-olds, but on that score it’s visually ravishing and actually rather touching.
It was directed by Nathan Greno, whose one other major credit is that he was the co-director of “Tangled” (a very engaging film). In “Swapped,” Greno orchestrates a vibrant green landscape known as the Valley that at a glance looks familiar and natural, though there’s a touch of primeval wonder in the vertical rock mountains jutting up into the sky.
Most of the creatures in the Valley have a supple fantasy dimension. The hero, Ollie (voiced with straight-up sincerity by Michael B. Jordan), belongs to a tribe known as the Pookoo, who look like sea otters and seem ordinary enough. But they’re jostling for resources with the Javan, who are like giant kākāpō (the New Zealand bird sometimes referred to as an owl-parrot) and have yellow-chartreuse plumage so bright it’s psychedelic. All the surrounding creatures are slightly surreal hybrids — fish with fauna on their backs, tree wolves with leafy red branches sprouting out of their heads and tails, algae-covered river stones that rear up like grizzly bears. Not to mention the Firewolf, the movie’s mythic villain, who’s just what he sounds like: an angry wolf with a body that’s literally on fire.
Early on, there’s a flashback to when Ollie, as a little-kid Pookoo, met Ivy (Juno Temple), a girl Javan, and introduced her to his tribal food: a bean pod known as a piplet, which gets sliced open to disgorge four yummy seeds that look like shiny avocado pits. At the time, his sharing seemed a mild act of kindness. But, in fact, it was a disaster in the making. The adult Javan, who are towering and regal (they reminded me of the giant Ray Harryhausen bird in “Mysterious Island”), began to consume the piplets en masse, which left the Pookoo without food. “Swapped,” like “Hoppers,” is an ecological parable of rival animal groups learning to work together in order to survive. (All these movies are allegories of the world today.)
The collaborative spirit is born when Ollie and Ivy, now grown up, each find themselves in the body of the other species. No, they haven’t traded places; it’s just that each has touched the magic glowing lavender pod that turns you into whatever animal you last said out loud. (This is what I mean by “Swapped” being ideal for little kids; the magic-pod device sounds like it was made up by a little kid.) Ollie, with his disgruntled all-American pluck, is now in the body of a Javan, while Ivy, with her British scolding elegance, is in the body of a Pookoo. The two are lost in the wilderness, which forces them to become friends, as Ollie learns to fly (in an exhilarating sequence), and Ivy learns…to move about like an otter (or something).
For a while, “Swapped” feels rather rote, since the body switching doesn’t amount to all that much. But when the characters meet Boogle, a purple-blue grouper-like fish with a luxurious multicolored seaweed back, the character, voiced by Tracy Morgan, gives the film a spark. Morgan, drawing on his comic persona, invests him with a slightly discombobulated forthrightness that makes the character as arresting as Ellen DeGeneres’s amnesiac fish in “Finding Dory.” Please Give Boogle his own sequel!
There is still more body switching, and more arbitrary plotting with the magic purple pods. Yet the film’s creatures have a storybook quality that grows on you, especially when the Dzo show up — giant moving tree-beasts that are like something out of “The Lord of the Rings.” (I’m not kidding; they’re grand.) Every animated feature creates its own world, but a number of those worlds now feel standardized. The one in “Swapped,” for all of the film’s connect-the-dots narrative simplicity, does not. It’s a world that lingers in your mind’s eye.
