Undertale the Movie (Concept)

Undertale the Movie is a live-action, 2024 American action/comedy film directed by Zack Snyder and written by Stephen Spielberg and Toby Fox. It stars Millie Bobby Brown, Tom Kenny, Emma Watson, and Henry Cavill. Based on the 2015 indie video-game of the same name, Undertale the Movie serves as a prequel to the 2023 film The Last Genocide and follows a younger, different incarnation of Frisk (Brown), who, when pursued by unknown killers, falls into the centuries-old Mt. Ebott and is forced into the adventure of a lifetime, which she never dreamed possible.

Snyder was hired by Paramount Pictures to adapt Fox's video game into a full feature film, noted because of his seamless mixing of practical effects and computer-generated imagery (CGI) in such films as Man of Steel. Fox, when offered, jumped at the opportunity to aid in the writing of the screenplay, and when he and Spielberg produced their initial finished copy it was turned down, referred to as "just too long of a movie." Fox and Spielberg rewrote the screenplay, cutting out large but mostly insignificant chunks of the story, as well as side characters that added little to the plot. It was still a very long film when the studio accepted it, with a runtime of nearly 3 hours and 25 minutes, but extreme charisma among the actors witnessed by Snyder during table-reads made him think that "everything was gonna work out fine." Filming took place between December 2023 and July 2024 on a $300 million budget, mostly in hand-built practical sets constructed in Utah, but some scenes were filmed on location in the mountains near Salt Lake City.

Being a video-game film, expectations were not very high when it was first announced. Despite its well-known cast, audiences expected it to be a poor adaptation. Upon release in August 2024, reviews were initially somewhat mixed, mainly with minor complaints about decisions in the adaptation, such as cutting out chunks of the original game. More of the reviews, however, praised the movie for its blurring the line between computer-enhanced characters and environments, and for its heartfelt performances, which stayed true and faithful to the source material. Undertale the Movie grossed $490 million, and received four Academy Award nominations, such as best leading actress and original score.

Plot
Voiced over by Frisk (Zendaya), a backstory ripped straight from the original video game is told, explaining the War of Humans and Monsters in a mural-style recap. A shot of Mount Ebott fades to color, and as the camera focuses on its side we see a young Frisk (Millie Bobby Brown) sprinting up the path, pursued by men in dark cloaks and masks (Anti-Monster cultists, as they appeared in The Last Genocide). As she reaches an opening in the side of the cave, she stumbles on a root and falls into the mountain.

When she awakes, Frisk finds herself underground where she meets Flowey the talking flower (Tom Kenny), who attempts to kill her. Toriel (Emma Watson) saves Frisk, and she leads her through the ancient Ruins (Here, the first difference from the source material occurs; the ghost Napstablook, serving as the game's first boss battle, does not make an appearance here). Toriel tries to take Frisk in to stay, but when she tries to leave, Toriel fights her to test her ability. When she loses the battle, she gives Frisk a tearful goodbye and disappears back into her home. Frisk encounters Flowey again, and he explains he has a bigger role to play than Frisk believes. He disappears and Frisk leaves.

In the snowy forest outside, Frisk meets Sans the skeleton (Sebastian Maniscalco) and his brother, Papyrus (Sean McLaughlin). To contrast the ominous tone the Ruins set, Sans and Papyrus lead Frisk through many comically failed attempts at puzzle-solving. In the quiet Snowdin Town, Frisk and Papyrus battle, and because he interpreted Frisk's mercy as flirting he invites her on a date. After the date, Papyrus leads Frisk toward Waterfall, where he receives a phone call and disappears apologetically. Hiding in a cluster of bushes, Frisk overhears a conversation between Papyrus and the captain of the king's royal guard, Undyne (Alicia Vikander), in which Papyrus is forced to track Frisk down to keep his position in the guard. In the source material, a character only known as "Monster Kid" was a major part of the Waterfall segment of the story, but in the film, played by Finn Wolfhard, he only makes a few brief appearances, as this segment in the film focuses more on Frisk's thoughts to expand her normally silent character.

Throughout Waterfall, Frisk argues mentally with herself, sometimes interacting directly with the magical Echo Flowers (which repeat the last thing they heard over and over). Her road is continuously interrupted by Undyne, however, who silently but ruthlessly attacks her. One of her attacks destroys a bridge, and Frisk is knocked unconscious by the fall and hears a memory of two unseen characters introducing themselves to each other. Frisk awakens before any names are heard, and she leaves the cavern she is in. A particular complaint heard about the film was that this portion of the game featured a ghost haunting a dummy, which was not included in the film, replaced with a longer introductory appearance by Napstablook (Xolo Maridueña).

Frisk continues until she finds an underground mountain at which she encounters Undyne, who directly confronts her. Instead of fighting, however, Frisk runs, leading her to Hotland. Undyne's armor heats up to the point of knocking her out, and Frisk revives her by pouring water on her. She leaves silently. Frisk finds a laboratory, in which she meets the scientist Alphys (Emma Stone). Alphys guides Frisk along through cell phone communication, but Frisk's path is interrupted at many points by her entertainment robot, Mettaton (Jesse Eisenberg). Finally, Frisk finds his hotel, the MTT Resort, in which Sans comes back, and he talks to Frisk about a woman behind the door to the Ruins he met - he means Toriel. He says he promised to protect her. He ends the conversation on a high note by mentioning Papyrus talking about bringing Frisk and Undyne together to hang out before disappearing again.

Frisk goes back to Waterfall, where she finds Papyrus. He calls Undyne out, and while their meeting is tense at first, Undyne opens up to Frisk and a friendship blossoms over an intense cooking session which leads to her house going up in flames. Undyne, despite the destruction, happily wishes Frisk farewell and goes to spend time with Papyrus.

Frisk returns to Hotland and enters the Core, the source of the underground's power. Here, she encounters many monsters, half of which she sees because of Alphys's accidental misguidance. In one of the wrong rooms, Frisk sees a hunched-over, seemingly melting figure, who whispers to himself. When Frisk tries to speak to him, he disappears. This scene was adapted from a randomly-generated event that took place in the video-game, in which Doctor W. D. Gaster, a mysterious, unexplained character, was played by Toby Fox himself. Audience reviews expressed an incredible excitement at the scene, as it was even more vaguely done in the game and seemed to confirm some of the theories made by fans. Fox did minimal motion-capture; he wore makeup and a costume which took 2 and a half hours to correctly apply, and the only computer enhancements in the scene were done around the character, who was completely practical.

At the end of the Core, Mettaton reveals that Alphys staged all the danger all the time, and he shuts the doors to the room, cutting her off from making a staged rescue. Frisk, having noticed glimpses of a switch on Mettaton's back during previous encounters with him, gets him to turn around and flips it. Mettaton seemingly explodes, but stage lights illuminate him in a humanoid form. The battle they have is staged like a television finale. When Frisk defeats him, Mettaton talks to Napstablook over the phone, and when other fans of his call him his mind is made up to stay in the underground rather than cross the Barrier. Alphys joins Frisk, saying Mettaton is simply out of batteries and can be recharged easily. Alphys accompanies Frisk through the main monster city, telling her the story of the king and queen's son, Asriel, and the first human to have fallen underground. At the entrance to the king's castle, Alphys reveals that Frisk has to kill him to leave the underground and disappears.

Inside the castle, Sans appears and tells Frisk about the exact circumstances of the fight she's about to have, and after he encourages her he disappears. In the next room over, Frisk finds coffins containing the bodies of all the humans the king killed. Then, she meets Asgore (Henry Cavill). He is clearly reluctant as he leads her to the Barrier.

While Toby Fox was reluctant, Spielberg, to make the story fit better as something that might actually happen in real life, proposed cutting out one of the game's several endings, in which Flowey killed Asgore in a surprise appearance and absorbed the human souls. This boss battle, however, while played up as the main climax of the story, played extremely heavily on Undertale being a video game, and hinged entirely on Frisk "resetting" the story and going back. To make it work better as a film, Spielberg eliminated the Omega Flowey scene and instead played with the option to go back before battling Asgore; he says that Frisk will be able to finish anything she started before their battle. Frisk takes a moment alone inside the castle, where she receives a phone call from Undyne, which prompts her to return to Snowdin Town. While Fox especially was reluctant to cut out such a large portion of the story, he knew that the "neutral ending" simply wouldn't work in a movie. In purchasable copies of the movie, however, there is footage behind the scenes of Snyder's VFX team creating a fully digital model of what Omega Flowey would have looked like in the live-action environment.

Undyne sends Frisk to Alphys's lab with a letter which Frisk doesn't know is romantic, and Alphys comes under the impression that Frisk herself wrote it and goes on a "pretend date" with her. It's revealed that Alphys has strong feelings for Undyne, who shows up just as she confesses. Frisk leaves them to talk, and it's only as she makes it back to Hotland that she realizes, passing through Alphys's lab, that her bathroom door is open. She finds out it isn't a bathroom at all, but an elevator which leads into a true laboratory. Frisk finds horrible deformities, which, when Alphys and Undyne arrive, the former reveals to have been monsters. She explains she was experimenting with making monsters practically immortal, and it corrupted and destroyed their physical forms. Alphys vows to be honest, and Frisk gets trapped in the elevator behind the couple, hearing a voice speak to her before passing out. She wakes up outside the shaft in the city, and she goes back to Asgore's castle. Before they can fight, Asgore is attacked by Toriel, who returns with all the monsters Frisk has met on her road. Alphys asks Papyrus how he knew to call everybody there, and he says that a tiny flower helped him. Then, they are all attacked and held hostage by Flowey, who tries to kill Frisk, but is interrupted by her friends, who defend her with magic. Flowey, enraged, absorbs the souls of both Frisk's friends and every single monster in the underground. He is revealed to be Asriel (Elijah Wood), Toriel and Asgore's lost son.

Asriel, under the impression that Frisk is his long-lost sister, Chara, fights her, trying to make her give up. During the battle, Frisk recovers the lost souls of her friends, who break free but can't hold any power over Asriel, who breaks down. During his attacks, Frisk is kept from being killed by an unseen force, who, through the light, she can see to be a young Chara (Scarlett Estevez), defending her. Asriel gives up on using his powers, and Frisk's name is officially revealed during the conversation they have, and, using all the souls he has absorbed, Asriel destroys the Barrier, and he disappears, unable to keep his form without all the souls. Frisk awakens surrounded by her friends, who express extreme relief before following her out of the mountain. Overjoyed to be free, they walk off one by one to join society, and Frisk confirms that she wants to stay with Toriel and all of the others, having no family left to return to.

Cast

 * Zendaya makes a cameo as adult Frisk, her main role in The    Last Genocide.
 * Millie Bobby Brown as young Frisk, a different    incarnation of the heroine who was the first to go through her timeline     without killing anybody at all.
 * Tom Kenny as Flowey, the maniacal, soulless form Asriel    took after being killed by humans.
 * Emma Watson as Toriel, ex-queen of the monsters.
 * Sebastian Maniscalco as Sans the skeleton, the comedic    older brother of two.
 * Sean McLaughlin as Papyrus, the hotheaded, energetic    younger brother of two.
 * Finn Wolfhard as Monster Kid, the obsessive young    monster who religiously praises Undyne.
 * Alicia Vikander as Undyne, the ruthless, golden-hearted    leader of Asgore's royal guard.
 * Xono Maridueña as Napstablook, the depressed, shy    ghost.
 * Emma Stone as Alphys, the reclusive, anxious royal    scientist.
 * Jesse Eisenberg as Mettaton, the expressive,    narcissistic entertainment robot made by Alphys.
 * Toby Fox as W. D. Gaster, the mysterious entity in the    Core.
 * Henry Cavill as Asgore, the king of monsters.
 * Elijah Wood as Asriel, Flowey's true form and prince of    the monsters.
 * Scarlett Estevez as young Chara, the younger vengeful    spirit revived by Asriel’s calls.

Production
Zack Snyder immediately knew, as soon as he had seen the full original game, he wanted to make as much of the film as practical as possible to make the experience feel real enough that the characters could easily be connected to. To this end, he used as minimal motion capture as possible - Sans, Papyrus and Flowey were the only characters to be full CG character models (Sans and Papyrus were done through full motion capture, while Tom Kenny's face was motion-captured onto a full CG model of Flowey). The rest of the characters were either full makeup (such as Undyne) or only partially digitally enhanced (Asgore, Toriel and Asriel had animated features, such as their snouts and ears). Those who wore only makeup all agreed it was brutally hot and felt incredibly uncomfortable at times, but it was worth the effort.

Snyder was initially uncertain about doing the film, since he had intended The Last Genocide to be merely a standalone story using Undertale’s characters. However, he admitted to wanting to try adapting the game for the big screen in the back of his head during The Last Genocide's production. Most of the cast were returning actors, save for young Frisk and Chara, who, according to Snyder, "had an uncanny sort of similarity to Zendaya and Victoria that made them great, even if they weren't spoken parts."

The initial draft of the story, Spielberg and Fox knew would be rejected by the studio, since it contained what they estimated to be eighty percent of the game's original content. Their second draft, which was accepted, contained closer to what they said was seventy percent. Most of the changes they made took out certain characters entirely, such as the Mad Dummy and Omega Flowey, but most simply had smaller roles like Monster Kid and Napstablook.

The costume design was very much inspired by the fanbase of the game, certain design choices taken directly from fanart, such as Sans wearing untied, blue sneakers in certain scenes where he isn't wearing his traditional pink slippers. Snyder and the design team agreed they wanted to connect as much of it to the fanbase as they could, especially to make fans feel as connected as Toby Fox wanted them to feel.

Trivia
Sean McLaughlin as Papyrus was a casting suggestion made by Toby Fox himself. Under his online moniker of "jacksepticeye," McLaughlin had played the game and tremendously enjoyed it. Fox called him directly, and he expressed no hesitation in playing Papyrus, who had been a fully animated character in The Last Genocide and had only two spoken lines which were read by Snyder himself.

In a deleted scene, Frisk and Chara as they appeared in The Last Genocide are seen tucking their children, Caroline and Azriel, into bed, telling them about their adventure as a bedtime story. They had filmed this scene during the end of production on The Last Genocide originally as an unused ending for the movie, which they did not simply scrap in the event that Snyder did decide to cover the original story. As a result of this, the film was originally going to be called The Undertale, which was how Frisk refers to the story in the scene. When they decided to present the story as a simple prequel rather than "a walk down memory lane," as Snyder described it, they put it in the extras of the disc edition of the film.

Sebastian Maniscalco reprised his original cameo as Sans, who had surprised viewers as the character in The Last Genocide with his perfectly balanced humor and serious tone. He was excited at the opportunity to expand upon the character, whom his daughter had loved, as a bigger role.

Alexander Beckham, who is responsible for the widely-known Undertale the Musical on the internet, was involved in the writing of the story, using some of his own ideas which he had come up with for the musical adaptation for the film. Originally, he would play the role of Mettaton as he did in the musical, but he declined it since he had never planned on playing the role before.

For the battle with Asriel, Snyder, drawing experience from filming Man of Steel, had Elijah Wood hooked up to a wire rig, on which he was lifted and carried around to simulate Asriel's flight. "It was my favorite part of the role," Wood said. "I mean, I got to fly. Who doesn't want to fly?"

Score
As one of the most popular components of the video-game, Toby Fox wanted to change his original music as little as possible. The most minor changes were made so that the melodies would go along better with the scenes in the film, and with the help of composer John Williams he arranged the game's score for a full orchestra.

Williams, who had done the score for The Last Genocide, saw this as an opportunity to expand upon small motifs he had written for the first film and develop them into full themes. While most of them were not used as much as he originally planned in favor of keeping the game's music in place, he was able to expand upon his themes, and he was able to score scenes where there was no music in the source material. Also, he weaved original motifs into the full pieces that came from Undertale, such as hints of Chara's heroic theme from The Last Genocide when she appears to protect Frisk during "Hopes and Dreams," which plays during the battle with Asriel. "Chara's Redemption" was also used in place of a reversed "SAVE the World" when Asriel destroyed the Barrier.