She’s a Barbie girl in a Barbie world, but the movie based on the iconic doll is entangled in a real-life political snafu, with GOP lawmakers criticizing it over a scene that features a map depicting China’s claimed territory in the South China Sea.
Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) were among those who ripped the flick last week ahead of its July 21 release date. One scene, originally shown in the movie’s trailer, shows a cartoon map that labeled parts of the sea that Vietnam claims as its own as Chinese territory. Vietnam banned the movie from domestic distribution as a result.
“China wants to control what Americans see, hear, and ultimately think,” a spokesperson for Cruz said, “and they leverage their massive film markets to coerce American companies into pushing Chinese Communist Party propaganda — just like the way the Barbie film seems to have done with the map.”
“Hollywood and the Left are more concerned with selling films in Communist China than standing up to the regime’s human rights abuses,” Blackburn said in a tweet.
“The ‘Barbie’ movie’s depiction of a map endorsing Beijing’s claims to the South China Sea is legally and morally wrong and must be taken seriously,” Blackburn said.
Republicans Reps. Mike Gallagher (Wisc.) and Mark Green (Tenn.) have also spoken out about the movie, which stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as the famed doll duo, Barbie and Ken.
Green said in a Twitter post that since the Warner Bros. film is “promoting a world in which China controls most of the South China sea, perhaps this movie studio should think twice about asking for assistance from the [Department of Defense] for its next action movie.”
“While it may just be a Barbie map in a Barbie world, the fact that a cartoonish, crayon-scribbled map seems to go out of its way to depict the [People’s Republic of China’s] unlawful territorial claims illustrates the pressure that Hollywood is under to please CCP censors,” Gallagher told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
In a statement to Variety last week, Warner Bros. Film Group called the map a “child-like crayon drawing” that appears “in Barbie Land.”
“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,” the film studio said.
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