‘Barbie’ studio responds to Vietnam map controversy

Vietnamese censors argued that a map in the ‘Barbie’ movie endorsed China’s maritime claims
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Warner Bros. has insisted that the movie never meant to back China’s territorial claims

Warner Bros. has said that a crude world map depicted in the new ‘Barbie’ movie is “a child-like crayon drawing,” and was not included to provoke controversy. Vietnam banned the movie due to the map supposedly showing much of the South China Sea as Chinese territory.

“The map in Barbie Land is a child-like crayon drawing,” a spokesperson for the Warner Bros. Film Group told Variety on Thursday. “The doodles depict Barbie’s make-believe journey from Barbie Land to the ‘real world.’ It was not intended to make any type of statement.”

The map appears in a scene behind the titular plastic heroine. It shows the world’s continents drawn out of proportion, with a dashed line protruding from eastern Asia. Vietnamese censors claimed earlier this month that this squiggle represents the “nine-dash line,” and banned the movie in response. 

The nine-dash line is a U-shaped border through the South China Sea that demarcates most of its oil and gas deposits, shipping lanes, and strategically desirable land masses for Beijing, including the Paracel and Spratly islands, Pratas Island, and the Macclesfield Bank.

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Vietnam disputes China’s claims within the line, as do Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines, and Taiwan. 

However, the line continually shows up in Hollywood movies. The action film ‘Uncharted’ was banned from Vietnam last year over scenes depicting the line, while the animated DreamWorks film ‘Abominable’ was pulled in 2019, and Netflix was forced to remove multiple episodes of its series ‘Pine Gap’ from distribution in Vietnam. The 2018 romantic comedy ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ was allowed to be shown after producers deleted a scene showing the offending border printed on a designer bag.

China is a lucrative market for Hollywood, and directors often alter the content of their movies to please Chinese audiences and comply with state censorship regulations. According to China’s National Radio and Television Administration, foreign movies can be banned if they “endanger” China’s “national unity, sovereignty, and territorial integrity.”