TL;DR – We explore the context behind why the Barbie movie got banned in Vietnam.

Barbie World Map Time –

When you dive into the world of media classification, many odd things can get a movie/show/game banned in a particular country. Pepper Pig could have an episode on Spiders are Friends, which you understandably don’t want to air in Australia. Or Zoolander being banned in Malaysia, which is fair given the country’s depiction. But can a film be banned for a map? Well, yes, as the Barbie Movie has found out today.

This leads us to have a bit of a different Map-It than usual as I combine my twin loves of Pop-Culture and International Relations to explain what has happened. To start with, what happened? Yesterday it was announced by Vi Kiến Thành, head of the Department of Cinema under the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism, that National Council for Film Appraisal and Classification had banned the Barbie film after a review of the movie [1]. But why could a map get a film banned? Well, can I introduce you to the Nine-Dash Line and Exclusive Economic Zones.

To understand why some dashes on a map can cause such consternation, we need to know about international borders are determined on the oceans. You can imagine that a land border could be easy to decide on, but when does the ocean stop becoming the territory of a nation-state? There has been a long history of conventions and customs around maritime borders, but they were codified in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea [2]. It is here where we get the length of the Exclusive Economic Zone determined at a 200 nautical mile limit [3]. In some places, that is easy to work out, but what if two countries EEZ overlap?

That brings us to the South China Sea, a region that already had competing claims between Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei & Philippines. Which has been escalated with natural resources found in and around the Spratly and Paracel Islands. But then imagine China coming into this situation, drawing several lines on a map and claiming all of the South China Sea for themselves. China has claimed that these dashes that can be found on a map going back to 1947 show they “[have] indisputable sovereignty over the islands in the South China Sea”[4]. However, in the very wordy “An Arbitration before an arbitral tribunal constituted under Annex VII to the 1982 United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea between the Republic of the Philippines and the People’s Republic of China” or just “Philippines v. China” the Permanent Court of Arbitration found that “with respect to the maritime areas of the South China Sea encompassed by the relevant part of the ‘nine-dash line’ are contrary to the Convention and without lawful effect”[5].

So we have learned that competing maritime claims surround the South China Sea and that on top of that, China and also Taiwan claim everything within the Nine-Dash Line. But what has that to do with the Barbie Movie? Well, on this front, we must make some assumptions. Now there is a chance that there is a more explicit mention of it in the full movie, but there was a map in the recently released trailer [6], and that map does have some dashes. Those dashes also come out of the continent named Asia. But are they referring to the Nine-Dash Line? Well, probably not. First, it is not a particularly accurate map regarding continent placement. That line could be coming out of north China or the top of Siberia. It is hard to tell with it squashed next to an upside-down Australia with no Tasmania or New Zealand and a giant Great Britain with a crown where Scotland should be. It is also not the only dashed line on the map, with at least one more coming out of what looks like Greenland.

However, while it probably is the case that the dashed line was not meant to represent the Nine-Dash Line, it is also completely understandable that countries in the region would be sensitive to its depiction given the continued tensions. It is also not the first time this has happened, with Abominable and Uncharted two other examples of films falling foul. Abominable at least has the excuse that it is set in China, so it contextually makes sense that the map could depict it that way. I am not sure what Uncharted’s excuse was.

So in the end, why did the Barbie Movie apparently get banned in Vietnam? Well, it is because it apparently depicted a representation of the Nine-Dash Line that Vietnam believes shows the film siding with China in a territorial dispute.       

Credits –

– The World Map that we used as a base several iterations ago was created by ‘San Jose’, which is shared with a Creative Commons Licence.

– The Map above was augmented by information sourced from South China Sea Claims and Boundary Agreements 2012, which was created by the U.S. Department of Defense and, as such, is in the Public Domain

[1] ‘Barbie’ movie banned in Việt Nam for containing China’s nine dash line map. 2023. Việt Nam News. https://vietnamnews.vn/life-style/1550659/barbie-movie-banned-in-viet-nam-for-containing-china-s-nine-dash-line-map.html

[2] United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. 1982. United Nations. https://www.un.org/depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unclos/unclos_e.pdf

[3] Maritime Boundary Definitions. 2023. Geoscience Australia. https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/marine/jurisdiction/maritime-boundary-definitions

[4] Limits in the Seas: No.143 China Maritime Claims in the South China Sea. 2014. Office of Ocean and Polar Affairs, Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, U.S. Department of State. https://2009-2017.state.gov/documents/organization/234936.pdf

[5] In the Matter of The South China Sea Arbitration. 2016. Permanent Court of Arbitration. https://pcacases.com/web/sendAttach/2086  

[6] Barbie | Main Trailer. 2023. Warner Bros. Pictures. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBk4NYhWNMM

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.