Contentious cartography: the controversial map that led to the banning of multiple movies
A map appearing in the background of a movie sounds innocuous and doesn’t seem as if it carries the potential to incite international outrage, and yet Hollywood keeps repeatedly making the same mistake by featuring disputed territory in multiple movies.
What do a family-friendly animated film, a billion-dollar cultural juggernaut, and a monotonous video game adaptation have in common? Almost nothing, apart from the fact they incurred the wrath of several nations by featuring the nine-dash line cartography of the South China Sea.
A strategically important region with abundant natural resources and fishing routes, China has maintained since 1947 that dividing the territory is its legal right. However, several other countries vehemently disagree, and they’ve shown no issues outlawing any film or television project that sides with Chinese sentiment, intentional or not.
DreamWorks Animation’s 2019 effort Abominable revolves around a precocious teenager befriending a Yeti and trying to reunite the creature with its family. It was a strong success at the box office after coming within a whisker of earning $190million, but it was banned in Vietnam ten days after its release once the authorities caught wind of the nine-dash line appearing briefly in a scene.
Malaysian censors demanded the scene be removed, and Filipino politicians called for a boycott. When the studio refused, Abominable was pulled from cinemas. There was clearly a lesson to be learned, but it was one that went unheeded after almost the exact same thing happened when Tom Holland headlined Uncharted.
Once again, a treasure map lurking in the background of director Ruben Fleischer’s uninspired adventure was spotted, and once again it ended up with the film being banned in Vietnam and the Philippines. Even though it was becoming very clear that the nine-dash line was the easiest way to be denied release in any country that disputed China’s claims, Greta Gerwig’s all-conquering Barbie went ahead and did it anyway.
By far the most bizarre incident involving the map, Filipino senator Risa Hontiveros insisted that “our cinemas should include an explicit disclaimer that the nine-dash line is a figment of China’s imagination” because “the movie Barbie is fiction, and so is the nine-dash line”.
Warner Bros’ response was borderline condescending, with the studio outlining how “the map in Barbie Land is a whimsical, child-like crayon drawing” and “the doodles depict Barbie’s make-believe journey from Barbie Land to the real world”. Still, it did release as intended in the Philippines, even if Vietnam took a much more hard-line stance.
This strange phenomenon isn’t just restricted to cinema, either. Two episodes of Netflix’s Australian drama series Pine Gap were removed from the Vietnamese library for featuring the nine-dash line after being accused of misrepresenting Vietnam’s sovereignty. The moral of the story is that Hollywood should stop making the same mistake, but on the other hand, international territorial disputes are hardly at the forefront of Tinseltown’s thinking.
