Harman and Ising - MGM

MGM

Harman and Ising 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 division of work they had used 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 series 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. In 1942, Ising also quit MGM, in his case to join the military.