Fantastic beasts cast a spell on China

But in the movie, for which Rowling wrote the original screenplay and gives a detailed description of the new creatures, qilin appears as something that most Chinese audiences would find unconventional.

In the opening scenes, Scamander ventures into a bamboo jungle, discovering a female qilin, with its iridescent scales giving off an almost divine glow, delivering twins that look like elegant, cute fawns.

These images were inspired from dik-dik, small antelopes inhabiting the bushlands of eastern and southern Africa, according to Christian Manz, the film's visual effects supervisor.

Manz recalls: "It (dik-dik) has an unusual snout, like a shorter version of an anteater snout, and the way it sniffs is really cute. As soon as we showed it to David Yates, he loved it. Mother Nature is often more fantastical than what we can imagine, so why not borrow a bit from her when you can?"

In the movie, qilin has a supernatural ability to see into a person's soul and know if they are pure of heart, making them integral to Grindelwald's machinations to seize power of the magical world, as well as Dumbledore's effort to stop him.

Making its debut in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, the first novel in the Harry Potter franchise published in 1997, the phoenix－also a mythological creature widely used in traditional Chinese culture to symbolize peace and prosperity－returns to soar in the new Fantastic Beasts movie.

With the popularity of a household poem written by Guo Moruo in 1920, the phoenix is said to be capable of rising from the ashes. This hints to a supporting character, who struggles with his childhood trauma.