Pixar’s latest animation, the futuristic WALL-E, gets to have it both ways: On one level, it is a jeremiad against consumerism - and especially about how we anaesthetize ourselves, at our own peril, by plugging into computers 24/7.
On a slyer level, though, it is a shameless plug for Apple Inc., the maker of some of those very products that encourage our disengagement. That subliminal message, as it turns out, is no coincidence.
WALL-E, the garbage-compacting robot who saves humankind, may not look very sleek with his chunky design and rusting parts, but when he recharges himself with rays of sunlight, he emits the Mac’s unmistakeable start-up chime.
His love interest, meanwhile, the sleek, pod-like EVE, “looks like the sort of robot Apple would build if Apple built robots,” as Baltimore Sun columnist David Zeiler put it.
Zeiler points out that EVE’s ’skin’ is the same shiny white plastic of a MacBook. Her body is egg-shaped with no visible buttons. Her arms lock seamlessly into the indentations on the side of her body – so seamlessly that in one scene the love-sick WALL-E has trouble locating her hand.
None of this is happenstance, of course. Apple Chairman Steven Jobs was the head of Pixar until 2006 (WALL-E was already underway by then), and after selling the company to Disney, he became Disney’s largest single shareholder. Jobs still serves on a steering committee for Pixar that oversees the Disney-Pixar animation businesses, and he’s on Disney’s board of directors.
When WALL-E’s director, Andrew Stanton, wanted to make EVE believable as a futuristic robot, he picked up the phone and called 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,” Stanton told Fortune. “The more I started describing it, the more I realized I was pretty much describing the Apple playbook for design.”
Jobs sent over Apple Senior Vice President of Industrial Design Jonathan Ive, the guru behind the iMac, iPhone and iPod, who spent a day with the Pixar team consulting on EVE’s design.
Stanton told Fortune that it was a “lovefest,” although Ive suggested few specifics.
“Apple is so proprietary and so secretive that he couldn’t even really allude to where the future of technology was going,” Stanton recalled. “The most he could do is nod his head to the things we said we wanted to do.”
For all the filmmakers’ admiration of Apple design, they take a very different stance towards their newest parent company, Disney, portraying the denizens of Disney-like theme parks in outer space as fat, infantilized morons.
That may score some points with parents. But be forewarned: While your children may no longer nag you to go to Disneyland after seeing WALL-E, they will be programmed to love all things Apple.
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1 Comments
#1. patrick 07.17.2008
Wall-E totally looks like the robot from “Short Circuit”… minus the cheesy 80’s style of course
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