Maybe this really is the year of “product suggestion”, a term coined recently by Risky Biz blogger Steven Zeitchik after noticing the subtle hint of a McDonalds logo on the driver’s helmet and race car in Speed Racer.
Following that, we now have Pixar suggesting iPods and other Apple products through its new animated film Wall-E. If you take a good look at the sleek robot character Eve, you might be reminded of the typical Apple product design, and apparently it’s not so coincidental. Wall-E director Andrew Stanton told Fortune magazine of Eve’s development and the benefit of having Steve Jobs as your umbrella:
“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.
Personally, I think Eve looks more like a hand-held fan I once had, but then I don’t really see the Double Arches in Speed Racer either. I guess I’m just not as consumer-oriented as some people. Yet it’s true that Stanton worked closely, at least for a day, with Apple designer Johnny Ive (whose name reminds me of Johnny Five, from Short Circuit, who definitely, if even unconsciously, influenced Wall-E’s title character, but I digress).
There’s just a hint of irony in having such subliminal product placement in a movie that clearly comments on the effects of consumerism (Wall-E’s function is to clean up all the trash left on Earth 700 years in the future). But when your parent company is mostly owned by the guy who also heads a company that sells fancy electronic gadgets, it’d be a complete missed opportunity to not do as Stanton has done.
So, should we be looking for a new iPod this summer? One that’s feminine, is capable of flying, and with which we’ll fall in love — enough to quit our jobs, as Wall-E does?
[via Fark.com]
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