Harman and Ising  Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising were an American animation team known for founding the Warner Bros. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer 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 Carman Maxwell stayed behind to try to start their own studio. Their plans went nowhere, however, and the men soon rejoined Disney to work on his "Alice Comedies" and "Oswald the Lucky Rabbit" films. It was during this time, that Harman and Ising developed a style of cartoon drawing that would later be closely associated with, and credited to, Disney. 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. The Oswald cartoons which Harman and Ising produced in 1928 and 1929 already show their distinctive style, which would later characterize their work on the "Looney Tunes" and "Merrie Melodies" cartoon series for Warner Bros. For example, in "Sick Cylinders" (1929) there are sequences which were later remade very closely in such Harman and Ising Warner Bros. efforts as "Sinkin' in the Bathtub" (1930) and "Bosko's Holiday" (1931). The Oswald cartoons that Harman and Ising worked on are completely different from the Oswald cartoons made before and after Disney and can easily be distinguished by anyone familiar with their work. Late in 1929, Universal Pictures who owned the rights to Oswald, started its own animation studio headed by Walter Lantz, replacing Mintz and forcing Harman and Ising out of work. Harman and Ising had long 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". The cartoon featured Bosko at odds with his animator – portrayed in live-action by Rudy Ising. Impressed, Leon Schlesinger, who worked at Warner Bros., hired Harman and Ising. Schlesinger wanted the Bosko character to star in a new series of cartoons he dubbed "Looney Tunes" (the title being a parody of Walt Disney's "Silly Symphonies").