Nathan Greno’s Swapped is a new low for a studio that continues to demonstrate it has absolutely no idea what it’s doing.
Swapped is the latest from Skydance Animation, the David Ellison-led animation studio known primarily for serving as a landing pad for producer John Lasseter after he was ousted from Disney/Pixar for sexual misconduct. Continuing the studio’s trend of recruiting established Disney and DreamWorks Animation talent, Tangled co-director Nathan Greno directs.
Long ago, the creatures of the valley lived together in harmony. Then everything changed when the firewolf attacked. Now, food is scarce, and animals are forced to fight for scant resources. For the otter-like pookoo Ollie (Michael B. Jordan), this is personal. Years ago, he showed the bird-like javan Ivy (Juno Temple) an act of kindness that saved the javan but doomed the pookoo to starvation, leaving him an outcast.
Ollie and Ivy have grown up before they see each other again, and their circumstances immediately make them bitter enemies. For about three minutes. Then they conveniently stumble across a piece of ancient magic that turns Ollie into a javan and Ivy into a pookoo, forcing them to work with each other and also the fish-like Boogle (Tracy Morgan) if they want any hope of restoring peace to the valley and returning to their original forms.
Swapped lowers the bar even further for Skydance Animation.
Cr: Skydance Animation/Netflix © 2025
To describe this as the worst film to be released by Skydance Animation (a studio that has yet to actually produce a good feature film) is true. But that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of just how bad Swapped actually is. This is, quite frankly, the worst animated film to be released by a major Hollywood player in years.
The script is derivative and vapid, to the point that if it were eventually revealed that the film was written entirely by ChatGPT, it wouldn’t even be surprising. Characters speak in overly verbose circles of exposition, constantly saying as many words as possible without ever actually stumbling into actual meaning or emotional depth, and the whole time careening towards a twist that somehow manages to be completely predictable despite coming completely out of nowhere.
It’s hard to blame the cast for this. Jordan clearly wants to find some sort of deeper meaning in his performance. Morgan clearly wants to devour as much animated scenery as possible. Cedric the Entertainer is trying to show off his legitimately underrated dramatic chops. There is obvious talent at play here, but the script is so utterly hollow that characters frequently talk for an entire scene without actually saying anything.
The studio has yet to justify its poor creative decisions.
Cr: Skydance Animation/NETFLIX ©2026 Skydance Animation
The animation doesn’t help the cast. To its credit, Swapped does shine in some of its nature scenes. The film’s sole highlights are when a shot takes a moment or two to focus on moss or foliage. But nature notably loses much of its complexity whenever characters are onscreen, and this film is a parade of wildly uninteresting character design.
I am not actually trying to accuse Swapped of being created with AI. I don’t know enough about the production to make a statement on that regard, one way or the other. But if an animated film were to completely outsource its character design to AI image generation, this is exactly how it would look. It’s impossible to sit through this PowerPoint presentation of “what if a hedgehog were a pinecone?” and “what if a bird had leaves?” and “what if a tree were a deer?” and not be reminded of Disney’s disastrous TED Talk on the potential for using AI to design Star Wars characters.
This would be wildly disappointing to see from any studio or filmmaker. But to see this from Skydance Animation is just… confusing. John Lasseter’s sexual harassment while at Disney/Pixar was so egregious that there were employees in charge of keeping his behavior in check. His hiring at Skydance Animation came just nine days after his official departure from Disney, making for one of the shortest “cancellations” of the #MeToo movement. Skydance Animation seemed extremely confident that Lasseter’s track record was worth the backlash. Still, three features and hundreds of millions of dollars later and the studio doesn’t have one worthwhile film to show for it. And they don’t seem capable of introspection or self-awareness to figure out where they’re going wrong.
The bottom line.
Children’s entertainment often gets a bad rap. Children’s animation especially so. But it is important. Children’s entertainment, when done well, has the opportunity to teach kids crucial life lessons during their most formative years. They provide youth with the opportunity to examine the world around them critically. They inspire greater levels of empathy. Swapped tries to do this. Maybe. There’s something resembling a message here, but it’s so clumsily executed that it’s impossible to tell how much of it is on purpose or even which side of the issues the film lands on.
Of course, some children’s films only manage to offer basic distraction. This fails on that front, too. My children, rarely ones to struggle with attention span, found it boring, which is one of the worst things a film can be. Children’s films can run the gamut from philosophical education to cheap babysitter. Swapped is more like giving a kid an iPad and then forgetting them in your car.
Swapped is streaming now on Netflix. Watch the trailer here.
Images courtesy of Netflix. Read more articles by Brogan Luke Bouwhuis here.
REVIEW RATING
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Swapped - 2/10
2/10
Brogan Luke Bouwhuis is a writer and film programmer whose frequent pop culture deep dives have allowed him to write about everything from the Richard Gere gerbil rumor to the history of the holiday yule log video. He co-hosts the Franchise Fiends podcast, co-captains the narrative shorts program at the Slamdance Film Festival, and co-created three children with his wife, Jessica.
