Directing his first full-length animated film since 2010’s “Tangled,” Nathan Greno’s “Swapped” isn’t the first body switch movie to release this year, nor is it even the first this year to feature anthropomorphic animals who have to save their delicate ecosystem from being torn asunder by an apex predator. What this Netflix original lacks in narrative originality, it makes up for through a game voice cast, a wonderfully realized world, and a surprisingly dark spin on its story. It’s not every day an animated movie attempts to tell a creation story and a fall of Eden tale using unique animal designs that have never been put to screen before, and “Swapped” earns its viewing time for trying its very best at putting a new spin on a familiar story.

Part of the immersiveness of “Swapped” is that it places viewers into its world without requiring them to pay direct attention to its idiosyncrasies. Some of its most gorgeous moments happen in the background. As described by one of its characters, giant creatures known as the Dzo helped populate the film’s world. The Dzo can best be described as walking forests, their base elephant-esque, yet they’re surrounded by foliage and food that give life to the creatures around them. All of the animals in “Swapped” appear to be carved of bark or tree, as if the genesis for creation was rooted in underbrush. Deer-animal beings, made out of white tree trunks, prance around, while the bodies of Root Snakes trade the smoothness of reptilian scales for something grimier and earthier.

It’s not easy to flesh out a whole ecosystem, and the creatures are just distinct enough that you’ll often do a double-take, thinking one looks like something you know, but on further investigation, you find it to be something completely new. It’s a touch like this that gives “Swapped” easy replay value; Greno and his animators lovingly craft so much into every frame, a testament to the love they have for the world.

Of course, as is usually the case with creation stories, such realities get flattened into myth, as with Ollie (Michael B. Jordan), a pookoo, a sea otter-type creature. When he was young, he showed a young green bird–called javans in this world–how to eat the pookoo’s food source. Ollie acted in good faith, but other javans soon arrived, driving away the pookoos and claiming the food as their own.

Outcast from his family for his naivete and for daring to trust an outsider, Ollie schemes how to reclaim the pookoo’s land. His attempts put him at odds with the same young javan he first met, named Ivy (Juno Temple), and after both touch a magical plant left behind by decaying Dzos, the two swap bodies, and are forced to work together once their actions unleash the feared Fire Wolf, whose incendiary rage caused the death and exile of the Dzos generations prior.

There’s nothing that “Swapped” is reinventing, but what sets Greno’s film apart is that it doesn’t treat its themes or messages–around the difficulty yet necessity of mercy, the beauty in realizing we’re stronger together than apart, to not look a gift fish in the mouth–as vegetables to begrudgingly eat before we get to the “exciting bits.” These ideas are treated with sincerity, and if their triteness starts to annoy us, it may be exactly the time we need to hear them again. This is a story about exiles trying to get back to their homeland, about the contagion of mistrust and malice, and it is riveting to witness characters learn to not just trust each other, but realize that they can’t make any progress in this world until they mutually share each other’s–if not humanity–at least shared story. “It’s time the valley was ruled by fear again,” the Fire Wolf utters; Ivy and Ollie’s journey is a test of whether that statement is correct or if there’s another philosophy to which one can root their lives.

Jordan and Temple have a delightful chemistry, the type of dynamic that sings as much when their characters bicker as when they celebrate each other. As characters, Ivy and Ollie believe they could have nothing to do with each other, but Jordan and Temple seemed attuned to the irony of this adamance, and it’s exciting to catch the ways they seemingly attune their vocal performances to match each other, as if to underscore the spiritual connection between them even if they reside in different bodies.

Ultimately, “Swapped” is not quite as rushed as something like “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” but the many obstacles set up in the film are resolved far too quickly. It follows a “fetch quest” type structure that can deflate its narrative momentum, where it will introduce a conflict–from Ollie not knowing how to use his javan wings to Ollie, Ivy, and their fish comrade, Boogle (a gregarious Tracy Morgan), unsure of how to cross a waterful–and resolve it in the span of the next scene. This rise and fall feels more disjointed than its economical run time might suggest.

The namesake for this site was famous for sharing that movies are machines that generate empathy. I’ve always found that to dovetail well with Atticus Finch’s famous line: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” This film understands the disruptive power of walking in new shoes and living in new surroundings, and it also knows that empathy doesn’t come just with metamorphosis. We need community, others around us to teach us how to walk around in those shoes, live in that skin, or, in the case of Ollie and Ivy, how to use one’s wings or paws. In this increasingly siloed world, it’s an uplifting reminder worth repeating.