In 2018, a short animated film version was released by Weston Woods Studios, a division of Scholastic, adapted, directed, and animated by Galen Fott. The strangely incoherent dialogue is a delight to both roll around in the mouth and interpret to suit our own means and imagined storyline.

Children and adults alike can guess at what the 'bug words' might mean and in doing so, inadvertently create a narrative all by themselves.The book offers a fabulous bugs' eye view of the world and its wonders with plenty of untold stories to explore. There’s a touch of magical realism to Ellis’s story; the cricket plays a violin, damsel flies build a tree house, the ladybird likes to relax in a deckchair and read a book (in her own language we assume. To me it was one of those texts that was fun to read, more like a theatrical performance done by a parent. But this is the wild world, after all, and something horrible is waiting to swoop down— booby voobeck!

This book is fabulous for helping adults to understand how a child with little language feels when sharing a book. I don’t speak Chinese so these bugs really do seem to be speaking a language I truly don’t understand. I haven't used it with pupils yet but will, we will work it all out together and it will help our decoding skills. But even for the novice like me the creative text is understandable and the piece a predominantly visual feast.The story, nominally about the life cycle of a plant experienced by the nattily dressed insects that live around it, is written entirely in dialogue, in a “bug language” invented by Ellis. It’s just so beautiful and the fact that it is written in Chinese characters makes it even more inscrutable,” she said. With minimal text and crisp images, Ellis's book is deceptively simple, but don't be fooled; this whimsical story requires a close reading to truly absorb all its subtle delights. Ellis’ precise and detailed illustrations of bespectacled bugs and an elaborate fort utterly beguile…It would be easy to make such a story clever for the sake of being clever, but instead Ellis has created one of the smartest, most original and most endearing picture books of this year. Very gently, Ellis suggests that humans have no idea what wonders are unfolding at their feet--and that what takes place in the lives of insects is not so different from their own.