Vietnam just banned ‘Abominable’ movie because of a map
SUMMARY
Vietnam outlawed Dreamworks' new animation "Abominable" on Oct. 14, 2019, because it showed a map acknowledging China's claim to a disputed part of the South China Sea.
Multiple countries — including China, Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines — have overlapping claims to the sea. Beijing claims a large portion of it as its own, and calls the U-shaped region demarcating it as the "nine-dash line."
Dispute over waters near Vietnam flared in October 2019 after Vietnam claimed a Chinese ship rammed and sank a fishing vessel.
A still from "Abominable" circulating widely on Twitter on Oct. 13, 2019, showed a map clearly showing a variant of the dashed line in the South China Sea.
"We will revoke [the film's license]," Ta Quang Dong, Vietnam's deputy minister of culture, sports and tourism, told the country's Thanh Nien newspaper on Sunday, Reuters reported.
The decision was directly a response to the map scene, Reuters added, citing an employee at Vietnam's National Cinema Center.
The movie, directed by "Monsters, Inc." writer Jill Culton, follows a young Chinese girl who wakes up to find a Yeti on her roof, and and is led on to a journey to the Himalaya mountains to find his family.
The Vietnamese-language edition of the movie — titled "Everest: The Little Yeti" — premiered in the country on Oct. 4, 2019, Reuters reported. It appeared to play for nine days before the culture ministry banned the movie.
Sen. Tom Cottons of Arkansas criticized the ban on Oct. 15, 2019, saying in a tweet that Dreamworks' display of the nine-dash line was an example of "kowtowing to the Chinese Communist Party by American liberal elites."
Oct. 9, 2019, broadcasters at ESPN used a map of China which incorporated Taiwan and the "nine-dash line" as part of its territory, sparking fresh criticism among Beijing's critics.
Country sovereignty is a sensitive topic in China too: Multiple Western designer brands have also landed in hot water in China for identifying the semi-autonomous cities of Hong Kong and Macau as countries, rather than Chinese regions.
This article originally appeared on Business Insider. Follow @BusinessInsider on Twitter.
