Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf(喜羊羊与灰太狼; Xǐ Yáng Yáng yǔ Huī Tài Láng) is a Chinese animated television series.It’s a normal summer afternoon. In the waiting room of a bank, all the customers focus on a cartoon playing on a TV screen. One of them bursts into laughter, and the others echo with chuckles.

Watching cartoons in line at the bank is nothing new in China. But this year it’s not the usual “Tom and Jerry.” Instead it’s “Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf,” a Chinese series. And for the Chinese cartoon industry, this is historic.

The last Chinese cartoon that stood up to Western competition was “Uproar in Heaven,” released in the early 1960s. That was a stylish retelling of the early chapters of “Journey to the West,” and it was a hit, winning awards in international film festivals, and playing around the world. But since that film, few Chinese cartoons have had any impact—even within our own borders.

But this new cartoon is different. A movie based on it, “Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf in the Year of Tiger,” came out for Chinese New Year, and rivaled even “Avatar” in terms of screens and gross. It ended up with the fourth highest gross, and—even though it only cost 10 million RMB to make, and features not a single celebrity—it still earned more than 126 million RMB theatrically. During Chinese New Year (February 12-21), cinemas kept adding seats and show times, and yet still there were ticket-less children crying outside.

Everywhere in China, children are clad in cute Pleasant Goat clothing, riding Pleasant Goat tricycles, wearing their Pleasant Goat backpacks, and eating Pleasant Goat candies. So how did a little cartoon get this big? When it first played in 2005, no one expected it to make such a splash…

Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf” tells a simple story about the ongoing war between a wolf and a village of goats. Huitailang (灰太狼, Grey Wolf) is determined to defeat these darn goats, all to please his battleaxe of a wife, Hongtailang (红太狼, Red Wolf). Like Wile E. Coyote, he spends his days developing inventions to catch the goats: dreamy toothpastes that make the goats somnambulate, stink bombs that knock the goats out, liquor that dissolves iron, and so on. But with Xiyangyang (喜羊羊, Pleasant Goat) leading the pack, and the village head Manyangyang (慢羊羊, Slow Goat) making his own counter-inventions, the bleating furries win out every time, leaving Grey Wolf to an inevitable cruel pan-beating by his wife.

Yao Lili, 28 years old, has been a faithful fan since 2006 when she was a Beijing college student. “I thought it was only for kids at first, because the goats move so slowly,” she said, “but later I found it so fun!” After they discovered this, she and her roommates only watched this one cartoon series—nothing else was allowed on the screens in their dorm.

What makes this cartoon so entirely different is the humor. “The biggest problem of most Chinese cartoons is that they want to educate children,” lead writer Huang Weijian said. “We don’t want to be stuck in that cliché. We just want to make something simple and fun.”

Simple and fun, it is. Basic tropes repeat themselves with each episode: whenever the chief goat thinks, grass grows from his head; Grey Wolf always runs away with an overconfident “I’ll be back!” (我会回来的 Wǒ huì huílái de). But the show also tackles contemporary culture. When “Supergirl Contest” got hot in 2005, Grey Wolf’s wife entered a singing contest. While the ancient alleyways of Beijing and Shanghai are being destroyed, the controversial character “拆” (chāi, tear down) recently appeared on the sides of huts in the endangered goats’ village.

Such nods to pop culture have helped win the show a number of adult fans, who’ve slowly worked to build a cult around the darker characters Lazy Goat and Grey Wolf. One popular slogan says it all:

Zuòrén jiù zuò lǎn yáng yáng, jià rén jiù jià huī tài láng.
做人就做懒羊羊，嫁人就嫁灰太狼。
Act like Lazy Goat; Marry Grey Wolf.