thanks guys!
man, that’s super depressing that arcade physics doesn’t support more control over the sprites bodies. It kind of defeats the purpose of having collision detection in the first place if the collisions are not based on the actual images of the sprites, don’t you think? 
I tried to change the physics to “matter” in my game config, and almost every line of code had an error because the matter api is so different from the arcade physics api, even in phaser! So basically if you want to switch over to matter you need to completely rewrite the game?