Nathan Greno’s Swapped (from Skydance Animation, streaming May 1^st on Netflix) is a body-switching movie with a difference: there are no humans. Instead, it’s an animal buddy comedy about sworn enemies. The sea otter-like Ollie (Michael B. Jordan), known as a Pookoo, and the kākāpō-like bird Ivy (Juno Temple), known as a Javan, accidentally swap bodies after crashing into a magic plant. They bond while trying to heal the divisions between woodland species of The Valley.

The project goes all the way back to 2018. Greno (Tangled) left Disney after 22 years and joined Skydance to make Swapped (when it was first called Powerless and later Pookoo). Although it was a very different story (four teenagers who transform into superheroes), the central idea of empathy always remained.

“David [Ellison, Skydance founder] could really get behind a story about empathy, seeing the world through someone else’s eyes,” Greno said. “And then it was really exciting when John [Lasseter, former Pixar and Disney Animation CCO] joined Skydance because he’s all about research. He really wanted to dig into what emphathy was, and that fundamentally started changing the movie.”

But then, six months later, Greno met with Lasseter and admitted that they were making the wrong movie and that they needed to radically alter the story. “I told him that it feels like it should be a transformation movie,” Greno explained. “And we’re missing important stuff about what it means to see the world through someone else’s eyes. And we need to use the camera to tell the story in a different way.

There was only one problem: animated movies about humans transforming into animals have been done to death. This was pointed out by production designer Noelle Triaureau. That’s when Lasseter suggested that they don’t have humans at all.

“That opened the door to some unique storytelling,” Greno suggested. “We did so much work and a lot more research into animals and nature and combining them for our characters, and then how we could use the camera. We wanted to start in the smallest way with the smallest creature because that’s how we feel in our world. We’re the little guy just trying to figure it out.So how do you capture that scale and really bring us into that world to make you feel like I’m one of those little Pookoo creatures? And what in the world can this small creature have in common with giant walking redwoods [called Dzo]?”

“And to John’s credit, he agreed and said, ‘What do you want to do?’ I told him ‘I want to blow up the movie.’ And he said, ‘OK, let’s do it.’”

That’s where the imaginative world building of the wondrous Valley and nature-driven creature design came in, often feeding off each other. This really pushed Skydance Animation Madrid and the satellite studio in Connecticut of former Blue Sky animators to more closely collaborate in adopting a slightly caricatured look.

In addition to the Pookoo and Javan, there’s a wide assortment of fantastical creatures, including tree deer, tree wolves, a rock bear, and root snakes. Plus, a whole underwater world of creatures, including an ally named Boogle (Tracy Morgan), who’s a purple grouper-like fish with algae for fins.

“It was trying to create differences within our world and between different species,” Greno said. “And also me growing up in this small town of Kenosha, Wisconsin, and kind of going out into the world and realizing, whoa, there’s other perspectives. I wanted to create that same kind of journey for our protagonists.”

Looking at nature docs, they created a working ecosystem: a valley that was tested by consulting experts. “Where is the water coming from? How does the sun work? What’s the migration patterns for every fish or a walking redwood? And we mapped this using existing animals onto these creatures and learned from different species to create our own,” added Greno.

“But we wanted an ecosystem that worked so that when you’re in the movie, you understand when it’s working and when it’s not. And it always comes down to you having predators and prey and that relationship. But then, when you create empathy, you sort of disrupt that a little bit.”