Abominable

Yi, a violinist in Shanghai, finds a young Yeti on her apartment rooftop and sets out to get him back to Everest. It is a DreamWorks Animation and Pearl Studio co-production directed by Jill Culton, with Chloe Bennet voicing Yi. What happened to the film had nothing to do with animation and everything to do with a map. One scene shows a wall map with the nine-dash line marking China's territorial claim in the South China Sea. Vietnam banned the film on 14 October 2019, ten days after release. When Universal refused to remove the scene, Malaysia and the Philippines followed. The Philippine foreign secretary suggested cutting the scene rather than banning the film outright. On a 75 million dollar budget it grossed 188.7 million worldwide, opening at number one with 20.9 million and posting the best opening of any original animated film that year. Who it is for: families, and anyone who wants to see Chinese landscape rendered in animation. Who it is not for: viewers expecting originality. Most critics reached for How to Train Your Dragon as the comparison.