The organisers of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics are taking a refreshing tack to picking their official mascot designs.

To do this, they've decided to consult Japan's 6.5 million schoolchildren, who will choose their favourite pair of mascots — one for the Olympics, and one for the Paralympics — out of three finalised designs submitted by the public.

The voting starts on Monday (Dec. 11), and the schoolchildren will vote in classes (i.e. one class will submit one vote).

The winning set of mascots will be announced on Feb. 28 next year.

Here's what they look like

The three final pairs of designs were chosen from among 2,042 public entries.

Although the sets of designs might look similar to the untrained eye, they actually differ in terms of their character design.

Set A consists of a pair of humanoid characters clad in the ichimatsu moyo, or chequered pattern of the Games' official logo:

Set B's Olympic Mascot is modelled after a maneki neko, or fortune cat, and an Inari fox. Its Paralympic Mascot is a guardian dog that's commonly seen at shrines:

Set C features a kitsune, or a fox, and a tanuki, or a Japanese racoon dog, with gold ribbons on their backs:

If you're interested, you can read more about the mascots here on the official Tokyo2020 website.

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The Tokyo Olympics are set to take place from July 24 to August 9, 2020.

Top image via Tokyo2020.

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