The Philippines Movie and Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB) announced Wednesday it will allow the upcoming Barbie film starring Margot Robbie to be released, but only if a “cartoonish” map that resembles China’s “Nine-Dash Line” propaganda map of the South China Sea is digitally blurred out.
Vietnam banned the Barbie film because of the map, which depicts almost all of the South China Sea as Chinese territory, even though countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines have competing territorial claims. The Philippines pressed its claim over China with an international tribunal in 2016 and won, but China has stubbornly ignored the ruling.
An infographic titled “South China Sea a hotbed of sovereignty disputes between China, coastal countries” created in Ankara, Turkey, on January 06, 2023. (Omar Zaghloul/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
When Vietnam announced its ban last week, the Philippine government said it would look closely at the film and decide whether to grant a Permit of Exhibit or not. The MTRCB did not specify the Nine-Dash Line map, which reportedly hangs on the wall of one character’s home in the movie, as the reason for potentially denying the permit request, but several Philippine politicians said the movie should be banned if the Chinese map actually appears in it.
The distributor of the Barbie film, Warner Bros., claimed the map in question is a “child-like crayon drawing” whose dashed lines “depict Barbie’s make-believe journey from Barbie Land to the ‘real world,’” and only coincidentally resembles China’s propaganda map, which uses nine dashes to mark Beijing’s fictitious maritime border.
On Wednesday, the MTRCB concluded its review and largely accepted Warner Bros. explanation for the “cartoonish map.”
“The Review Committee is convinced that the contentious scene does not depict the ‘nine-dash line.’ Instead, the map portrayed the route of the make-believe journey of Barbie from Barbie Land to the ‘real world,’ as an integral part of the story,” the MTRCB said.
“Rest assured that the board has exhausted all possible resources in arriving at this decision as we have not hesitated in the past to sanction filmmakers/ producers/distributors for exhibiting the fictitious ’nine-dash line’ in their materials,” the MTRCB added.
For the uninitiated, Barbies are a line of dolls that have been very popular with young girls for generations. The Barbie movie follows some of the dolls traveling to the “real world” and becoming human.
“The Board believes that all things considered, it has no basis to ban the film ‘Barbie’ as there is no clear nor outright depiction of the nine-dash line in the subject film,” the MTRCB said in a letter to Philippine Senator Francis Tolentino, one of the most outspoken critics to demand the film be banned over the map.
However, the MTRCB found it an interesting coincidence that Barbie’s journey to the Real World would meander around a land mass clearly marked as “Asia” in a manner that happens to resemble the Nine-Dash Line, albeit with only eight dashes and a somewhat different overall shape. The Philippine review board also pointed out that the Philippine islands, along with Malaysia and Indonesia, have been omitted from the cartoonish map for some reason.
The MTRCB said in its letter to Tolentino that it has asked Warner Bros. to “blur the controversial lines in order to avoid further misinterpretations” when Barbie opens in Philippine theaters. The studio did not immediately offer a public response to this request.
Tolentino held a press conference on Wednesday to say he respected the MTRCB’s decision, but repeated his objections to China’s “continued encroachment on Philippine waters” and clear violations of “the rights of our fishermen, even the Philippine Navy and the Philippine Coast Guard.”