Map in ‘Barbie’ Movie Angers Asian Nations

Joe SaundersJuly 5, 2023

You’ve come a long way, Barbie.

Americans might have expected controversy over a movie about the iconic Mattel doll to run along the same battle-of-the-sexes lines that have been drawn around the toy in the more than 60 years since it launched.

But thanks to the leftist morals of Hollywood, the fight has moved into the realm of world politics, and with the “Barbie” movie’s release date still a little more than two weeks away, the movie makers are already bowing to Beijing.

Check out the report from WGN-TV in Chicago:

It might seem impossible to inject a burning point of international tension into a fluff-brained, live-action movie about a children’s toy, but creative leftists are nothing if not creatively leftist.

And in the “Barbie” case, they’ve injected a brief scene into the movie that just happens to take the side of the Chinese Communist government in a dispute over maritime territory involving China and its Pacific neighbors.

The scene includes a map of the world, drawn in a child’s scrawl, that shows the rough geographical position of major points of global interest.

Do you plan to see the “Barbie” movie?

Next to the landmass labeled “Asia,” are purely gratuitous dashes that represent the Beijing government’s claim to the waters of the South China Sea.

The disputed waters “are also being fought over by Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, the Philippines and Taiwan,” according to Fox News.

Michael Sobolik, a former aide to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, called out the scene in a Twitter post.

.@wbpictures bends the knee to the genocidal CCP regime to make a buck.https://t.co/FdtXbAUDou

— Michael Sobolik (@michaelsobolik) July 3, 2023

“[Warner Bros. Pictures] bends the knee to the genocidal CCP regime to make a buck,” he wrote. Much of the filming was done at Warner Bros. studios in Watford, England, according to the entertainment news website Distractify.

China’s Asian neighbors are infuriated.

Vietnam has already banned the movie, according to Fox. Philippine lawmakers are considering doing the same. Anyone even faintly interested in fairness would agree they have a point. But anyone familiar with the world population knows that the Chinese movie market dwarfs either of them — and for Hollywood, that’s all that matters.

Social media users, including Cruz, were critical.

Thanks for the heads up. The CCP is probably helping bankroll this film like they are many for woke/headed for broke Hollywood. Maybe the Chinese public will make this film a winner for all its blond headed stars. I’d love to see some of these studios just move to Beijing.

— John J. Dwyer (@JohnJDwyer1) July 4, 2023

Sounds trivial but it’s not, they made the conscious decision to use the map that pleases the CCP!

— Bill (@MorningJoefan1) July 5, 2023

I guess Barbie is made in China…. https://t.co/CDB1IzZcvm

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) July 3, 2023

Everyone understands China is a huge market for Hollywood’s products, and aligning a product with a market is basic capitalism. But that isn’t how Hollywood markets itself.

Year after year, at increasingly tedious award ceremonies, Americans are lectured to by Beverly Hills leftists who claim to be artists creating works to explore the human condition, when they’re really on the whole just a bunch of grifting smut-peddlers, whose latest achievement is prostituting a classic of Americana to suit the whims of genocidal tyrants running the most dangerous global rival of the United States.

Back in the innocent old days, disputes about Barbie generally involved the doll’s anatomically unlikely (if not impossible) breast, waist and leg measurements.

Then there was the infamous “math is hard” controversy in which a talking Barbie’s statement echoing the experiences of young people everywhere caused such a storm that the doll had to be pulled from the market. (It supposedly reinforced stereotypes about women and mathematics. But men and women across the spectrum have probably had the same thought.)

Now, Barbie has gone from tired arguments over alleged sexism, stereotyping and objectifying women and girls, to spreading totalitarian propaganda in the eastern Pacific.

In fairness, though, it looks like the Chinese propaganda might be the least tedious thing about it. Check out the official trailer below:

Regardless, it never had to happen. Including the dashes on the map was so unnecessary, so inane, that it could only have happened if someone in the movie’s production staff decided to preemptively start licking Beijing’s boots — or someone in the CCP had snapped his fingers to demand obeisance from those brave Hollywood artists.

China’s arrogance has caused issues like this before. The hugely grossing “Top Gun: Maverick” enraged the Communists by including a flash of a scene that showed Taiwan depicted on the lead character’s jacket (there was at least some internal logic to that).

And then there was “First Man,” the 2018 vehicle starring Ryan Gosling (who plays Ken to Margot Robbie’s Barbie in “Barbie”). The filmmakers decided that a crowning scene of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landing on the moon to plant an American flag could do without an … American flag. Why hurt Chinese sensitivities?

But taking a bubble-gum movie like “Barbie” and pushing it straight into the middle of a conflict involving multiple countries requires the kind of morally blind obtuseness that only a leftist could love.

Barbie will never be the same.