It’s no accident that Eve, Wall-E’s sleek, pod-like love interest in the forthcoming Disney/Pixar animated feature film by the same name, looks like something out of Apple’s (AAPL) design department.

Writing in the current issue of Fortune, Richard Siklos reports that Jonathan Ive, head of Apple’s design department and the man responsible for the iMac, iPod and iPhone, had a hand in creating the robot.

In the piece, director Andrew Stanton tells Siklos:

“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. The more I started describing it, the more I realized I was pretty much describing the Apple playbook for design.” (link)

According to Siklos, a call from Stanton to Steve Jobs in 2005 resulted in Ive spending a day at Pixar consulting on the Eve prototype. Siklos writes:

“Stanton said that it was a ‘lovefest’ with Ive, but that the notoriously tight-lipped design wizard offered few specific modifications. ‘Apple is so proprietary and so secretive that he couldn’t even really allude to where the future of technology was going,’ says Stanton. ‘The most he could do is nod his head to the things we said we wanted to do.’ (Through a spokesman, Ive declined to comment.)” (link)

Disney (DIS) bought Pixar in 2006 in a deal that made Jobs Disney’s largest individual shareholder.

Stanton, who directed Finding Nemo, says he’s been kicking around the idea for Wall-E for years, even before Toy Story was made. He has summarized it most succinctly like this: “What if mankind evacuated Earth and forgot to turn off the last remaining robot?”

The movie opens June 27, which is the day the smart money is betting that the 3G iPhone goes on sale.

You can read Siklos’ piece at Fortune.com here.

It may come as some consolation to the investors who lost their shirts as Apple (AAPL) shares collapsed over the past month that nobody lost more, at least on paper, than its CEO.

As the company’s largest individual stockholder, with 5,546,451 shares directly owned, Steve Jobs (were he paying attention) could have watched the value of his holdings drop from $1.126 billion just before Christmas to $771 million at Wednesday’s close, a paper loss of $354 million.

Over at Walt Disney Co. (DIS), where Jobs is also the single largest stockholder, the news is even more grim. The value of the 138 million Disney shares he owns (thanks to the sale of Pixar two years ago) fell from a pre-Christmas high of $4.588 billion to $3.935 billion yesterday, a loss of $652 million.

That’s a total hit of just over $1 billion in the space of a month.

Of course, these are just paper losses. Like any shareholder, Jobs doesn’t actually lose a penny unless he sells his stock at the lower price. But given the fact that his annual salary is once again a symbolic $1, this might not be a bad time for Apple’s board to start looking for another way to compensate its hard-working CEO. At least that’s how Fake Steve Jobs sees it:

I just called Peter Oppenheimer and told him to get into position with the options machine and be ready to begin firing on my order. We’re going to wait and see how bad things get today. I think this might be a golden opportunity for a handful of top insiders to make some quick money. Ideally we’d like to see the stock get down below $100. Keep your fingers crossed! Daddy needs a bigger jet. (link)