English children grow up with Winnie the Pooh, while in Europe, there are Asterix, Tintin and Diddl Mouse to keep the little ones amused. Another rodent family, Mickey Mouse and friends, has long dominated the American animation world, and the Japanese managed to build an entire empire out of a lipless feline named Hello Kitty. Even Hong Kong has a lovable piglet called McDull that takes trips up the Peak tram.

On the Chinese mainland, it has taken until relatively recently for a few sheep and a big gray wolf to come into their own as characters that Chinese children can totally identify with, and that have the commercial potential and success cartoon characters overseas have long enjoyed.

These furry creatures, Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf, are hogging the box office and racking in countless millions in film rights merchandising. (Right, they are sheep, but there is no difference between "sheep" and "goat" in the Chinese language.)

There is nowhere you can go in China without bumping into these characters - from the most remote village to the most populated cities.

Hole-in-the-wall shops in one-street villages strategically place the sheep kiddie-rides just outside the door. In shopping centers in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, specialty shops selling pens, pencils, erasers and other accoutrements of scholarship spot their cute, fluffy countenances.

Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf was mooted by Creative Power Entertaining (CPE), an animation team based in Guangdong province. It prefers to dedicate its resources to the production of the television and film facets of the series and outsources the merchandising franchise to about 300 different companies that use the characters on more than a thousand products ranging from clothes to food to toys.

In the line-up before the Spring or Mid-Autumn Festivals, for example, the shopping frenzy incited by festive goodwill sees doting parents buy children's clothes emblazoned with big-eyed sheep faces, which are also stamped on mittens, caps, hat, socks and the traditional lanterns.

This is already an unofficial billion-dollar industry without counting the television revenue and the box-office takings.