Abominable movie gets cut in Asia over ‘wrong’ China map
The animated movie Abominable from DreamWorks Animation has landed in controversy in Southeast Asia as the film features a map of China showing the Asian giant’s maritime claims disputed by its neighbours.
A top Philippines official has backed a boycott of movies from the Comcast-owned production house, joining Vietnam. At the centre of the dispute is an apparent endorsement of Beijing’s “nine-dash line” that lays claims to 80% of the South China Sea.
In Malaysia, censors ordered the scene removed from the movie, Reuters reported.
“For me, call a universal boycott of all DreamWorks production here on,” foreign secretary Teodoro Locsin said in a tweet, reacting to a Twitter post by a maritime-law professor calling for the movie to be banned in the Southeast Asian country.
But unlike Vietnam, which ordered cinema halls to pull the movie, the Philippines has not imposed any restrictions yet.
DreamWorks is the latest example of a business getting caught in the geopolitical crossfire as countries tussle over issues ranging from sovereignty claims to maritime boundaries.
The US National Basketball Association (NBA) found itself in the centre of a storm last week after a team official expressed support for the prodemocracy protesters in Hong Kong in a tweet that was later deleted.
While Vietnam has been the region’s most forceful nation in pushing back against Beijing’s South China Sea claims, tensions have been simmering between the Philippines and China as well. President Rodrigo Duterte, in a rare rebuke of China earlier in 2019, told his neighbour to lay off an island in the disputed waters. Manila has also escalated a protest over the presence of more than 200
Chinese vessels near the area.
Duterte is pressing ahead with a plan to explore oil and gas in the sea jointly with China, which has promised 60-40 revenue sharing favouring the Philippines. The US estimates the region has $2.5-trillion in unexploited hydrocarbon resources.
In a separate tweet on Thursday, Locsin said “failure to react may be seen as a kind of submission on a diplomatic level”, adding “but our reaction must be minimally invasive of free speech concerns.”
Abominable is a Chinese coproduction about a teenage girl, Yi, who finds a yeti on the roof of her Shanghai home.