It’s definitely a conscious design choice to make Wall-E and Eve boy and girl. But why does it work? How can design make us think boy and girl about robots?

When filmmakers set out to make a film, they tap into our collective memories to save time and use shortcuts. Our collective memories come from many many things like society, upbringing, media, culture and stories we consume. It’s learned.

This is where design comes in. Let’s take a second to define the obvious design differences between them:

• Wall-E is blocky, square while EVE is round, smooth.
• Wall-E’s movements are rough, jerky and clumsy. EVE’s movements are elegant, beautiful, poetic.
• Wall-E is dirty and brown. EVE is white and clean.
• Wall-E’s voice vs. EVE’s voice.

If you ever watched an anime, like the image above, you can notice how the design works towards establishing a ‘boyness’ and a ‘girlness’. Because animes are usually very reliant on these shortcuts and it’s projected very clearly. From hand and feet sizes to the use of curves, it’s all tapping into our collective memory to establish the information it wants to give and moves on to the story.

You can also imagine the movement from the drawings above. You can imagine the boy is clumsy and inexperienced. That’s how he moves, how he walks. The girl is confident and in her own head. That’s how she moves and walks.

In Wall-E, before the love plot kicks in, there is a few moments where they need to communicate Eve is a girl, before Wall-E falls in love and goes “Wooooow”. They do this with using the shortcuts of how we perceive ‘girlness’.

It’s not necessarily the love plot. It’s our collective memories used as shortcuts to tell a story more efficiently.