Newsweek's Sarah Ball briefly talks to Andrew Stanton, the director of Wall-E about the conflation between animated and non-animated films as well as why Eve has a freakin' gun. He also mentions a sequel. I really hope they don't go there.
Eve has gotten some blog buzz as the one of the best-written female characters of the year. Since she goes around blowing things up, what feminizes her?I'm probably going to offend you, but I was just trying to sort of emotionally and temperamentally capture what I've always seen a male-female relationship to be. At least out of my experience -- and I'm a nerd. I've always been shocked and waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop that a girl would ever talk to me, let alone want to marry me. They always seem to hold the power to me, and from my mother to my wife to my daughter, every time I try to really figure them out, and think I've got them pegged, I pay for it. There's a mercurial nature, but more of a mysterious nature to women that I think is what makes them so attractive. And I think that that's what I love: Guys never seem to know when they've come too close and crossed the line, and then the temper comes.
AKA, then Eve guns something down.
Exactly. That's really what the gun was all about, was Wall-E having no clue where the boundaries were with a woman. Because men don't either. Men just stumble into it and find out through experience. And they either survive it, or they don't. And that's really all it was, was a metaphor for that. The fact that she was high-technology and she had a subcutaneous technology that you couldn't really see, I felt, one, made her just technologically more beautiful and stuff, because wanted her to be pretty in a way that another robot would possibly see another machine being pretty, not pretty in the way that humans see somebody. But [her façade] also just kept her a mystery. There's something about her -- the fact that she floats. That fact that he touches the ground and he's all dirty, and she can stay clean. Some of these are kind of conventional thinking for the gender, but they just worked -- they worked on a primal level.
Read rest of interview here.