Harman and Ising
Harman and Ising were an
animator/
film director/
film producer team, comprised of
Hugh Harman and
Rudolf Ising, and best known for founding the
Warner Bros. and
MGM animation studios.
Harman and Ising first worked in animation in the early
1920s at
Walt Disney's studio in
Kansas City. When Disney moved operations to
California, Harman, Ising, and fellow animator
Carmen Maxwell stayed behind to try to start their own studio. Their plans went nowhere, however, and the men soon joined Disney out West to work on his
Alice Comedies and
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit films.
When producer
Charles Mintz ended his association with Disney, Harman and Ising went to work for Mintz, whose brother-in-law, George Winkler, set up a new animation studio to make the
Oswald cartoons. However, the rights to Oswald were owned by distributor
Universal Pictures, which started its own animation studio headed by
Walter Lantz in
1929, replacing Mintz and forcing Harman, Ising and others out of work.
Even while still with Disney Harman and Ising had aspired to start their own studio, and had created and copyrighted the cartoon character
Bosko in
1928. After losing their jobs at the Winkler studio, Harman and Ising financed a short Bosko demonstration film called
Bosko, the Talk-Ink Kid, notable for being the first sound cartoon of the late-1920s "talkie" era with dialogue. The sound cartoon, which featured Bosko at odds with his animator (portrayed in live-action by Rudy Ising) impressed
Leon Schlesinger, who paired Harman and Ising with
Warner Bros.. Schlesinger wanted the Bosko character to star in a new series of "
talkie" cartoons he dubbed
Looney Tunes. The two animated
Sinkin' in the Bathtub in
1930, and the cartoon did well. Harman took over
direction of the
Looney Tunes starring the character, while Ising took a sister series called
Merrie Melodies that consisted of one-shot stories and characters.
The two animators broke off ties with Schlesinger later in
1933 over budget disputes with the miserly producer. They had maintained the rights to the Bosko character, and they signed a deal with
MGM to start a new series of Bosko shorts in
1934. The two maintained the same sort of workload they had had at Warner Bros.: Harman worked on Bosko shorts, and Ising directed one-shots. They also tried unsuccessfully to create new cartoon stars for their new distributors. Their cartoons, though technically superior to those they had made for Schlesinger, were still music-driven shorts with little to no plot. When the new
Happy Harmonies series ran significantly over-budget in
1937, MGM fired Harman and Ising and established its own in-house studio headed by
Fred Quimby.
Harman and Ising still found some work as animation freelancers, directing, for example, the
Silly Symphony Merbabies for
Disney in
1938. When Disney later reneged on a deal he had made for two other Harman-Ising pictures, the animators sold the cartoons to Quimby at MGM. Quimby later agreed to hire the animators back to the studio. Ising created the character
Barney Bear for MGM at this time, basing the sleepy-eyed character partially on himself. In
1939, Harman created his masterpiece,
Peace on Earth, a downbeat
morality tale about two squirrels discovering the evils of humanity, which was nominated for an
Oscar. Despite the success of this and other cartoons, MGM's production under Harman and Ising remained low.
In
1941, Harman left MGM and started a new studio with Disney veteran
Mel Shaw. The two took over
Ub Iwerks' old studio in
Beverly Hills, California, where they created training films for the
Army. Ising quit the studio in
1942 to join the military.
Harman and Ising are little known, even among some animation fans. This stems largely from the fact that they did not create any enduring characters. Instead, they created
studios that would
later produce such characters. Nevertheless, without them, the world might never have seen such famous characters as
Bugs Bunny,
Daffy Duck, and
Tom and Jerry.
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