Barbie won’t be banned in the Philippines after all, following a week-long review by local censors and government officials, although a scene with a controversial map of the South China Sea might be blurred for release.
The Warner Bros film, directed by Greta Gerwig and starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, will be released in the Philippines on July 19 as originally planned.
Censors were concerned by a scene with a map of the South China Sea that was thought to be displaying the “nine-dash line”, representing China’s territorial claims, that is contested by several governments in the region. The map scene previously got the film banned in Vietnam.
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The Philippines Movie and Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB) said it finally concluded that the “cartoonish map” shown in the film was not intended to portray the nine-dash line. That decision was reached after screenings in front of the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Office of the Solicitor General.
“The Review Committee is convinced that the contentious scene does not depict the ‘nine-dash line.’ Instead, the map portrayed the route of the make-believe journey of Barbie from Barbie Land to the ‘real world’, as an integral part of the story,” the censor board said in a statement.
However, the MTRCB also said that it has requested Warner Bros to blur the map scene so that no viewers would misinterpret the sequence.
The film has been granted a PG certificate, which means that viewers below 13 years old must be accompanied by a parent or supervising adult.
Vietnam, Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei all say that the nine-dash line violates their sovereignty. The U-shaped line was also repudiated in an international arbitration ruling by a court in The Hague in 2016. But China says the line represents its territorial claims in the South China Sea and refuses to recognize the ruling.
Other films depicting the line have been banned in both the Philippines and Vietnam in recent years, including DreamWorks Animation’s Abominable and Sony’s Uncharted.
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