COOL STUFF

Apple's Designer Actually Helped Design Wall-E's Eve Robot

by Alex Billington
May 18, 2008
Source: Fortune

I love Wall-E! I'm telling the truth when I say I watch the trailer almost every single night. I wanted to make mention of a great article today about the design of the Eve robot in Wall-E. We've all seen and fallen in love with the cute little yellow robot named Wall-E, but we can't forget to mention Eve - Wall-E's love interest. In the film, Eve is sent from the mothership to investigate Earth and the innocent and romantic Wall-E falls in love with her. In an article in Fortune, Wall-E's director Andrew Stanton explains that Apple's lead designer, Jonathan Ive, who is credited as the designer of the iMac, iPod, and iPhone, was referred to Pixar for a day via the request of Steve Jobs.

"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."

Back in 2005 when Stanton was working on the basic elements of the film, he called up Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who sent Jonathan Ive over to Pixar to consult with Stanton on the prototype. While he did provide a few tips and ideas, Stanton said that Ive, who is notoriously known for not saying much, didn't really make too many modifications. "The most he could do is nod his head to the things we said we wanted to do." Ive wouldn't comment on the situation, but it's definitely exciting to hear that Apple's design guru had a hand in designing one element of Wall-E, even if he didn't change too much.

If you're curious about the design of Wall-E himself, too, Stanton mentioned back at WonderCon in February that the original idea came to him while he was playing with binoculars at a baseball game. "You don't need a mouth, you don't need a nose, you get a whole personality just from [the binoculars]." As for Wall-E, Stanton said that he "wanted to see it as a machine first and as a character second." I'm very curious to hear the complete stories behind the development of all of the major characters and will definitely be sure to follow up with Stanton about this as we near the release of Wall-E in June.

Apple fans and other Wall-E supporters should check out the full article in Fortune, although there isn't much beyond what we've already mentioned. I'm personally looking forward to Wall-E more than any other movie this summer and I'm mesmerized by every last article I read on the design and development, especially anything from Andrew Stanton. Wall-E hits theaters everywhere on June 27th. Stay tuned for plenty more great coverage of Wall-E as we head deep into the summer movie season!

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