Warner Bros. has now responded to the controversy over the upcoming Barbie movie’s alleged use of a map that favors communist China.The Barbie movie took a hit this week after Vietnam banned the film from playing in the country due to it allegedly featuring a map with the “Nine-Dash Line” in it, a fake border that the Chinese government uses to show it controls a majority of the South China Sea.
In a statement quoted by state media, Vietnam’s Department of Cinema chief Vi Kien Thanh said the country will not “grant license for the American movie ‘Barbie’ to release in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the Nine-Dash Line.”
As Breitbart News reported, the “Nine-Dash Line” has no international recognition and it was soundly defeated by an international court in 2016.
“China simply ignored the court ruling and proceeded as though its territorial claims were legitimate,” said the report. “Vietnam, a fellow communist nation, has its own territorial claims in the South China Sea and has grown increasingly confrontational with China over them. In addition to Vietnam, the ‘nine-dash line’ claims for China the sovereign territory of the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Taiwan.”
On Thursday, a spokesperson for the Warner Bros. Film Group told Variety the map in question had no intention of ever making a statement, asserting that it simply meant to depict a child-like crayon drawing.
“The map in Barbie Land is a child-like crayon drawing,” the spokesperson said. “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.”
Stills from the film seem to support this claim and Variety provided some further context without jumping into any spoilers:
But how does the map function in the movie itself? Keeping spoilers at a minimum, Robbie’s Barbie is facing an existential crisis inside the walls of her pink dream world. McKinnon’s Weird Barbie encourages her to go on a journey of self-discovery and provides her with a map to “the Real World,” one made with whimsy by a fellow doll. What some have taken to represent the “nine dash line” is what one source described as “journey lines,” the serial dashes often used in family animation and kid’s drawings to represent where a character has traveled to or from.
The map in the film also features only eight dashes, not nine. Other parts of the map also feature similar dashes to show the character Barbie’s journey across the fictional world.
On Wednesday, a spokesperson for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) accused the movie of pushing Chinese propaganda.
“Senator Cruz has been fighting for years to prevent American companies, especially Hollywood studios, from altering and censoring their content to appease the Chinese Communist Party,” the spokesperson said.
“China wants to control what Americans see, hear, and ultimately think, and they leverage their massive film markets to coerce American companies into pushing CCP propaganda—just like the way the Barbie film seems to have done with the map,” the statement continued. “Sen. Cruz deserves credit for reversing these trends.”
Paul Roland Bois joined Breitbart News in 2021. He also directed the award-winning feature film, EXEMPLUM, which can be viewed for FREE on YouTube or Tubi. A high-quality, ad-free stream can also be purchased on Google Play or Vimeo on Demand. Follow him on Twitter @prolandfilms or Instagram @prolandfilms.
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