May 13, 2008 01:00 PM
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If Eve, the sleek lady-bot that becomes the apple of Wall-E's eye, looks like a shiny consumer gadget you'd want to own, it's not surprising. The Pixar/Disney animated space adventure Wall-E consulted with Jonathan Ive, one of the great Apple minds behind the iPod and iPhone, during the Eve's design process. In an interview with Fortune Magazine director Andrew Stanton describes his Apple inspiration, and what it was like trying to get information out of the tight-lipped Ive. So does Eve also need to be recharged after 4 hours of use? More details on the Apple and Pixar collaboration after the jump.
It's no huge surprise that Apple was involved with Wall-E. After all, CEO Steve Jobs sold Pixar to Disney and is a large shareholder for Disney.
In the Fortune article Director Andrew Stanton describes how he envisioned Eve and even inadvertently takes a stab at IBM.
"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." It is, of course, not the first time a product has inspired a film character - think of the murderous HAL 9000 robot in 2001: A Space Odyssey, based loosely on big IBM mainframes of the day.
And not surprisingly, Jonathan Ive declined comment in the article. According to Stanton, Ive didn't have too much to add, and was very tight lipped on many details. It's because the chip they implant in their brain keeps all the great Apple minds in check.
If Eve was an Apple inspiration, what was little M-O inspired by? He looks a bit reminiscent of a George Foreman Grill. [Fortune Magazine via CNN Money]
Send an email to Meredith, the author of this post, at meredith@io9.com.
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