In the play, a tramp/narrator falls asleep in the woods and dreams of observing a range of insects that stand in for various human characteristics in terms of their lifestyle and morality: the flighty, vain butterfly, the obsequious, self-serving dung beetle, the ants, whose increasingly mechanized behaviour leads to a militaristic society.

[2] Act II of the play was translated by Robert T. Jones and Tatiana Firkušnỷ in 1990 for the book Towards the Radical Center:A Karel Čapek Reader.

[3][5] BBC Television has presented the play three times, to varying critical response: first 30 May 1939, in a production by Stephen Thomas;[6] then 28 May 1950 (Selver translation adapted and produced by Michael Barry, with Bernard Miles as the tramp);[7] then 19 June 1960 directed by Hal Burton.

[11] Ethel Mannin, writing in the anti-Stalinist magazine New Leader of July 6, 1936, described life in Stalin's Russia as resembling The Insect Play.

Before the film was released, Švankmajer stated that it "will combine dark comedy, grotesque, classic horror genre, and both animation and feature acting.