[1][2][3] Featuring music composed by Richard Teitelbaum,[4] the film was produced over the course of four years, while Pitt was in residence at Harvard University and in Berlin, Germany.

[4] Asparagus has been characterized as a surrealist work,[7] and has been analyzed for its exploration of identity, gender, sexuality, and the human psyche through a feminist lens.

She watches a garden of unusual plants pass by the windows and sees a giant figure that grasps at an asparagus stalk in the ground before vanishing.

[a] She then heads outside into the night with the suitcase, walking past several shops along the city streets—whose windows display dildos, firearms, baby dolls, and cigarettes—and stops at a theater.

[12] She writes that Pitt explores identity and gender in Asparagus through "three major motifs: the asparagus/phallus (which she equates to nature and wholeness), the faceless woman, who is both a magician and mother figure, and the relation of objects to self (which conjoins narcissism and fetishism)".

"[11] In 2007, Pitt described the film as follows:[9] Asparagus was the culmination of my childhood and all that I had assembled in terms of a worldview: the nature of the creative process portrayed as psycho-sexual intimacy [...] the searching for contact and ultimate realization of pure existence.

I seem to have a compulsion to put a baby in each of my films, to suggest a woman's ongoing fascination with children and with having babies.Buchan, in analyzing the sequence in which the woman passes by the shops along the city streets, wrote that the presence of a window display of baby dolls, which she describes as preceding a neighboring display of pills in bottles, suggests "that the only identity option for women—motherhood—causes pain and needs pharmaceutical relief.

"[5] Philosopher and psychoanalytic theorist Joan Copjec viewed Asparagus as conveying regressive themes detrimental to feminism, suggesting that the film's placement of the faceless woman "outside society, in nature, is to extract her from, and forever deny her entrance to, the very site of [feminist] struggle".

[6] Buchan rejected Copjec's reading of the film, stating that Copjec "locates her argument in a psychoanalytic framework of Freud's construction of sexuality as lack [that is, the absence of the phallus], and Ernest Jones' argument that she summarized as desires that are 'the naturally different expressions of an essential, biological difference and penis envy can then ultimately only be a girl's revulsion at her sex".

[12] Therefore, Couzin writes, the asparagus/phallus can be positioned "as faeces, as the castrated penis and as the powerful desiring impetus which embodies the inability of both male and female to ever completely replicate that infantile empathy at the mother's breast".

[12] Calum Russell of Far Out described the film as an exploration of sexuality, and wrote similarly that, "the title itself is a reference to the androgynous nature of the asparagus plant; phallic in its infancy before flourishing into feminine bloom".

[7] Additionally, Buchan links the "phallic snake" that appears in the film's opening with the association between serpents and the devil, as well as seduction as it relates to the biblical fall of man.

[20] The scene in which the woman watches the garden pass by her windows involved shooting for over a period of 48 hours, during which, Pitt recalled, "I never slept or left the camera room.

[22] Journalist Diane Jacobs reported that, "during the coldest days of February, audiences repeatedly lined up (some viewers as many as 12 times) to admire and readmire [Pitt's] creation".

[15] Robert W. Butler of The Kansas City Star described the majority of Asparagus's initial audiences as "museum patrons who enthusiastically received the film".

[17] In 1992, Couzin called the film "not only a stunningly beautiful work of animation, but also an important document of the struggle to articulate through the image the role of the woman".