[2] Belgian artist Frans Masereel had had success in Europe in the 1920s with his wordless novels made from woodcuts;[3] he pioneered the genre in 1918 25 Images of a Man's Passion.

[4] Passionate Journey followed the next year and caught the eye of German publisher Kurt Wolff,[5] whose republication of it topped sales of 100,000 throughout Europe.

[6] In late 1929 filmmaker Janine Bouissounouse put Masereel in contact with the Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, who was interested in including an animated sequence in a proposed film, which was never made.

[16] Bartosch was handicapped from birth so that he had great difficulty walking; Richard Neupert speculates this may have accustomed the animator to long, solitary hours of work.

[13] Masereel considered Georges Auric for the score, but found the composer's music "soppy"[c] and a poor match for the work.

Masereel had long been acquainted with the Swiss composer Arthur Honegger via the avant-garde theatre groupe Art et Action [fr].

[10] The film blends objective and subjective modes—at times realistic, at others characters can seem indistinct and changeable: the protagonist towers over others in one scene while in another is so small she slips into an envelope.

[18] The sound version found receptive audiences in Europe,[3] though distribution was limited due to censorship over its socialist themes.

He attempted an animated anti-war film in colour called Saint Francis: Dreams and Nightmares, but abandoned the work when he and his wife fled, as the Nazis descended on Paris.

[8] Animation historian Giannalberto Bendazzi assessed The Idea as "one of the rare films in which political commitment does not conflict with lyricism".

[21] Film historian and theorist Rishard Neupert called The Idea "an exotic animated project that combines a wild variety of textures and pacing into a truly unique product with its own rhythm, episodic structure, and frustrating logic".