[It began over the weekend, when moviegoers in Vietnam noticed something shocking on their screens while they were watching “Abominable,” an animated film about a girl called Yi in a city that looks a lot like Shanghai. She finds a yeti on her roof and embarks on a journey across China — replete with soaring mountains and fields of yellow canola flowers, not a polluted sky in sight — to guide him home to Mount Everest.]
By Anna
Fifield
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This image released by
DreamWorks Animation shows characters, from left, Peng,
voiced by Albert Tsai,
Everest the yeti, Yi, voiced by Chloe Bennet and Jin,
voiced by Tenzing Norgay
Trainor, in a scene from “Abominable.”
(DreamWorks Animation
LLC./AP)
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BEIJING — China’s territorial ambitions and
pop culture have clashed — again.
Barely a week after a single tweet detonated
a firestorm against the Houston Rockets and the NBA, another international
incident has erupted. But this time, China is the country being punished.
It began over the weekend, when moviegoers in
Vietnam noticed something shocking on their screens while they were watching
“Abominable,” an animated film about a girl called Yi in a city that looks a
lot like Shanghai. She finds a yeti on her roof and embarks on a journey across
China — replete with soaring mountains and fields of yellow canola flowers, not
a polluted sky in sight — to guide him home to Mount Everest.
The film was the first co-production between
DreamWorks Animation, the American production company owned by NBCUniversal,
and Shanghai-based Pearl Studio. The heads of the studios wanted to create a
film that would appeal equally to American and Chinese audiences, enabling them
to capture the two largest movie markets.
But perhaps the Chinese side went too far in
appealing to nationalist tendencies in Beijing.
In one scene, Yi repeatedly walks past a map
on a wall, which contains the unmistakable dotted U-shape of the nine-dash
line, encompassing a swath of the South China Sea that Beijing claims as its
own. Other countries — including the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and
Vietnam — claim rights to the resource-rich sea.
The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The
Hague ruled against China in 2016, declaring that Beijing’s assertion of
sovereignty over the South China Sea has no legal or historical basis.
Beijing rejected the decision and has
continued to patrol and build islands in the sea to extend its de facto control
over the waterway
Tensions have grown in recent months as a
Chinese survey ship with a coast guard escort has sailed through an area
controlled by Vietnam. Vietnam has licensed Russian energy giant Rosneft to
explore for oil in the area, prompting protests from China.
So moviegoers in Vietnam, where the film is
called “Everest: Tiny Snowman,” were outraged to see the dotted line on the map
over the weekend. Some shared it on social media, and that prompted officials
to take action against the film, which opened in Vietnam on Oct. 4.
“We will revoke [the film’s license],” Deputy
Culture Minister Ta Quang Dong told the Thanh Nien newspaper, according to
Reuters.
Another official, cinema department director
Thu Ha, confirmed the action. “We will be more alert and cautious in future,”
Vietnam Insider quoted her as saying.
Vietnam’s main movie-theater chain, South
Korean-owned CGV, stopped selling tickets to the film, said representative
Hoang Hai. All information and trailers have been removed from its website and
YouTube channel.
DreamWorks could not be reached for comment,
and Pearl Studio did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
It was not the dotted line’s first appearance
this month on screens outside China.
ESPN, the U.S. sports channel, was sharply
criticized for using a map showing the line — although it had 10 dashes — when
reporting on the furor over a tweet by Daryl Morey, the general manager of the
Houston Rockets basketball team. That stemmed from a different territorial sore
point: the protests in Hong Kong over Beijing’s increasingly heavy-handed
governance of the supposedly semiautonomous territory.
The nine-dash line is seldom, if ever, used
by anyone outside China, and ESPN was accused of going too far to try to
appease Beijing.
Still, the appearance of the nine-dash line —
or the friendly themes of “Abominable” — have found a generally approving
audience in China. Box-office sales have exceeded $14 million, according to
Maoyan, China’s largest online movie-ticketing service provider.
“Benefiting from the magnificent Chinese
scenery and heartwarming Chinese emotions, the movie has broken through
cultural differences as the first animated film produced by China and
distributed globally,” Maoyan said. “It can be regarded as a new paragon of
cultural exports.”
The film has scored 7.5 out of 10 on the
Douban review site, China’s equivalent of Rotten Tomatoes.
“A good animation. Classic Hollywood story
line with strong Chinese characteristics,” wrote a reviewer using the screen
name Sikaodemao. “Displaying the scenery of the beautiful motherland makes it
like a tribute film to the country. But it is highly entertaining and all the
kids were laughing.”
Another commenter, Tang Xiaowan, was less
impressed. “Chinese skin, American core,” Tang wrote.
China is a cutthroat market for Hollywood
studios. According to Chinese rules, only 38 foreign films are allowed to be
shown in Chinese movie theaters each year, fueling competition among studios to
make films that will win Chinese authorities’ approval.
There have been several examples of movie
producers altering scripts to please Beijing.
When “Red Dawn” was rereleased seven years
ago, the villains, who were meant to be Chinese, suddenly became North Korean.
In the disaster movie “2012,” Hollywood added references to Chinese scientists
rescuing civilization.
Yin Hong, professor of film and television
studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said political and economic elements
needed to be considered when making co-productions.
“Of course China is actively propelling its
movies toward world viewers,” he said, “but it’s not always easy to get what
they want.”
Wang Yuan contributed to this report.
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