Cute critters and birds changes species and give us a charming animated film.
“Swapped” says it’s a body swap animated movie, but it’s not like Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan being in each other’s shoes in “Freaky Friday” or killer Vince Vaughn and teenager Kathryn Newton trading places in “Freaky.” It’s the kind that basically imagines Tom being a mouse and Jerry being a cat, Sylvester being a bird and Tweety being a cat, and the Aardvark being an ant and the Ant being an aardvark.
It’s also another one of those animated movies to symbolize world peace, like “Trolls: World Tour,” “Princess Mononoke,” “Klaus,” or “The Wild Robot,” so “Swapped” is not original in that notion. Although we do need it, especially with the Iran War going on. But it does have the right voice actors, animation, seriousness, and colors to make it a fun movie for kids. And I think even though this is shown in very few theaters, I think this is the one to be shown in theaters instead of Netflix, and not the awfully bland “Animal Farm.” Sometimes, I think either movies releases are cross-eyed or certain movies have their own principles. But I’ll bore you another time.
The pookoo are woodland critters who struggle for survival and to avoid the Javan birds as much as possible. The young hero Ollie (voiced by Michael B. Jordan) is the outcast of his tribe for helping a baby Javan eat plant pods, and tries to prove his worth to his dad (voiced by Cedric the Entertainer).
There are magic tree called the Dzo, which have pods that allow the different species to become different species and that’s the only way they could understand each other. A bird could be a fish or a tree deer could be a plant wolf. An evil fire wolf, however, threatens the existence of those trees and the whole valley, which is why the different species can’t trust each other. But that doesn’t stop Ollie from finding a pod and being turned into a Javan version of himself. And then, a Javan named Ivy (voiced by Juno Temple) finds one and becomes a pookoo version of herself, so these two must collaborate to find the magic pods with some help from a fish (voiced by Tracy Morgan).
“Swapped” was directed by Nathan Greno, who is best known for directing “Tangled,” and like that film, this one has gorgeous animation with the look almost being realistic. The fire, the water, and the night sequences all look fascinating. And the color palettes are well-used with green, yellow, brown, and purple. We all know that John Lasseter left Disney and is serving as the head of Skydance Animation, which distributes this film, so it’s proof he still has some good stuff left in him.
What perplexes is me is why the animals, birds, and fish need the pods to understand each other if this is an animate feature where they can talk to each other. It’s never really explored, and “Hoppers” made the better distinction of how the hopping technology differentiated how the animals look and act in that film. They look like animals through the regular human eyes, but with that technology, they look and act like cartoon characters. That’s obviously the better movie of its kind out right now.
But makes “Swapped” a fun kids movie is how they use Jordan and Temple as the leads with less cliches and more whimsey, how Morgan has to attempt different voice acting levels when his character has to do a certain thing later in the film, and how the animation has that sort of “Rio” quality to it. Think of this almost like “I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Bird. I did! I did Taw a Puddy Bird!”
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