Wall-E’s Eve: Designed By Apple?
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Tuesday, 13 of May , 2008 at 1:21 am
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine commented that Eve, Wall-E’s girlfriend, looked kinda like an iPod. I didn’t agree, not so much because I couldn’t see the resemblance, but mostly because I didn’t want to admit that Apple may have some subtle influence over the design of a major character in a Pixar movie. Turns out I was dead wrong, and Apple’s influence over Eve wasn’t even particularly subtle, reports Fortune Magazine. Here are some excerpts from the article:
“I wanted Eve to be high-end technology - no expense spared - and I wanted it to be seamless and for the technology to be sort of hidden and subcutaneous,” Andrew Stanton, Wall-E’s director, told Fortune. “The more I started describing it, the more I realized I was pretty much describing the Apple playbook for design.”
A call from Stanton to Jobs in 2005 resulted in Johnny Ive, Apple’s behind-the-scenes design guru, driving across the San Francisco Bay to Pixar’s converted warehouse headquarters to spend a day consulting on the Eve prototype. Stanton said that it was a “lovefest” with Ive, but that the notoriously tight-lipped design wizard offered few specific modifications. “Apple is so proprietary and so secretive that he couldn’t even really allude to where the future of technology was going,” says Stanton. “The most he could do is nod his head to the things we said we wanted to do.”
I’m honestly not sure whether this should matter at all, but it kinda does, to me anyway. It’s not exactly product placement, but at the same time, it’s a little unsettling that Pixar, to some extent, is looking to Apple to help them define what is futuristic rather than trusting what (until now?) has been a wonderful imagination and vision of their own.
[ Fortune ] VIA [ The Pixar Blog ]
Category: Art
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Comment by Joe Deeley
Made Tuesday, 13 of May , 2008 at 7:17 am
How weird is it that Wall-E resembles Johnny Five from Short Circuit and the guy helping design Eve is Johnny Ive? Things that make you go, huh? Don’t forget that Pixar was once purchased by Steve Jobs.