Joel on Film

It is easy to underestimate just how important worldbuilding is, especially for an animated movie, whose appeal both to kids and to their parents relies almost entirely upon what they’re seeing and how they’re seeing it. In that respect, Swapped occasionally overwhelms us in its visual acumen, creating an entire world that looks so much like our own cascades of forests and bodies of water that we revel in the small details that set it apart. We surely don’t, for instance, have canine-like beasts roaming our lands, with branches of leaves where their ears should be.

Within this meticulously detailed and vibrantly realized world, an adventure story takes place that finds two inhabitants of it—members of species who have been at odds with each other for an age—accidentally swapping places in exactly the sense of the term that comes to mind. Body-swap stories are old news at this point, but director Nathan Greno is obviously hoping that this unique setting, as well as the set of unique circumstances specific to these characters, will move us past the broadness of the concept. It’s a shame to report that the details of this story are so slim, so broad and so basically predictable that no amount of marvelous animation can quite get us over that hump.

There is potential, though, everywhere we turn, and that includes the two characters in question. Ollie (voice of Michael B. Jordan) is a squirrel-like Pookoo, constantly underestimated and ignored by his kind, mostly for his unassuming nature and, later, for a very specific error in judgment that launches a lot of the initial conflict. Ivy (voice of Juno Temple) is a Javan, which looks like a colorful bird and whom Ollie met when they were both a little too young to remember each other many years later.

Ollie, out of the naïve goodness of his heart, once showed Ivy how to harvest seedlike pods for food—an act which revolutionized an entire ecological system for the Javan but left the Pookoo scavenging for the next several years. Ollie’s already-fragile reputation takes a massive hit, even as he believes that a method of crossing the communication barrier between the Javan and the Pookoo might work to fix some of those problems. For his family (Cedric the Entertainer and Justina Machado voice his parents), there’s really no coming back from a mistake like that.

As for the method of cross-communication, the answer might lie in a glowing pod located in a concealed part of the forest—although the main conflict and source of the film’s gimmick resides there also. After a slight scuffle with a Javan, Ollie lands on a pod and switches consciences with Ivy, whose own family (with sisters voiced by Ambika Mod and Lolly Adefope) is initially reluctant but eventually welcoming of their former forest rival. All of this is promising enough as the start to a story, but once Ollie and Ivy swap personalities and minds, it’s a little difficult to see where the story can actually go.

For the team of screenwriters (John Whittington, Christian Magalhaes and Robert Snow), it basically means the usual trajectory for such comedies, as both Ollie and Ivy vehemently try to reject their new shared reality, eventually work together to try and fix it and are inevitably drawn into the film’s external conflict, which ties back to a legend that surrounds this place and its past. That’s a lot less interesting than the filmmakers seem to believe, even with the casting of Tracy Morgan as a character whose evolution is theoretically fascinating but, ultimately, kind of a misstep. It’s mostly an excuse to give us a very literal villain, hiding in plain sight and planning a form of ultimate destruction.

There is so much about the build-up of Swapped that really, truly works that its climactic turn toward the familiar and the routine is slightly underwhelming. The lesson here is that it takes a bit more effort crafting what’s on the page to lend credence to the undeniable craft of what’s on the screen, and this movie, despite absolutely impressing in that latter respect, drops the ball on the former.

Rating: **½ (out of ****)