Sex Education Cartoons For Kids Captivate Prudish China (VIDEOS)

Thanks to a taboo-breaking series of sex education cartoons, more Chinese kids can now know where they come from.

The one-minute films, made by Nutcracker Studio, gently and humorously explain the birds and bees to little ones (or at least tell parents how to).

The now-viral segments are actually revolutionary in a nation that blushes at the notion of informing its youth about sex, reports English-language Chinese news outlet Xinhua. In fact, some parents jokingly tell their kids they were found in a dump.

One of the segments illustrates the difference between boys and girls by showing how male and female dogs pee differently. Another more serious one tells minors how to avoid being molested, incorporating the image of a man enticing a girl with a lollipop. And the third attempts to explain where babies come from by deleting the image of trash cans and getting to the basics: a sketch of a sperm approaching an egg.

The quaint nature of the cartoons may have attracted attention in the Western press, but in China, the clips have become massively popular. According to Foreign Policy, "One-Minute Sex Ed" videos became the second most popular subject on Chinese search engine Baidu, and the clips have attracted well above a million views on China's version of YouTube.

However, informing youngsters may still be an uphill battle. In a 2012 Newsweek report titled "China's Sex-Ed Problem," one parent complained to CCTV, "I didn’t understand sex when I was a child. In retrospect, it was a good thing. Why can’t my son just grow up with the same ignorance as I did?"