Warner Bros has described a map that appears in its coming Barbie movie as a “child-like crayon drawing” with no intended meaning, after Vietnam said it would ban the film after claiming the map depicted the disputed South China Sea.
The Barbie movie provoked controversy in both Vietnam and the Philippines over its inclusion of the map that apparently features China’s “nine-dash line”. The line marks China’s claim to much of the South China Sea – a demarcation opposed by Vietnam and other south-east Asian countries and which was repudiated by an international tribunal in The Hague in 2016.
