The Hound and the Rabbit

Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising helped usher in the golden age of American animation. They worked for Walt Disney in Kansas City and California, created Bosko (which they copyrighted), and made the first Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons for Leon Schlesinger at Warner Bros. So when MGM decided to compete in the realm of animated short subjects, they hired Harman and Ising to launch their new line: Happy Harmonies, a riff on the Disney Silly Symphonies and Warner series that they had helped create and a pun built on the partnership itself. You could say that Harman and Ising were harmonizing on these cartoons, which they modeled Disney's Silly Symphonies, with an emphasis on music and visual gags and minimal dialogue. The partners divvied up the films with Harman directing the Bosko entries and series characters and Ising directing the one-shot cartoons. The technicolor comedy The Hound and the Rabbit (1937) was one of Ising's shorts, a sweet, simple little short about a warren of cute, fun-loving rabbits, a curious dog that just wants to play, and a fox up to no good. While the big, friendly dog (nicknamed Sniffy) and the chittering, boyish bunnies are not regular characters they are familiar types in the Harmon-Ising cartoon universe, innocent and trusting and loyal characters who bond over a shared game of football. Because what is football if not the sport of rabbits? The lively score was composed by Scott Bradley, another Disney veteran who Harman and Ising hired to be the composer for their animation unit. Bradley also composed for the concert hall but his greatest success came at MGM, where he became the house composer of the studio's animation unit for the next two decades and created the memorable musical soundtracks to the wordless Tom and Jerry cartoons, the most popular cartoons from MGM's animation unit. Thirty-seven Happy Harmonies cartoons were produced between 1934 and 1938 before the studio shut down the unit for going over budget but Harman and Ising continued making cartoons for MGM for the next couple of years, including their landmark anti-war fable Peace on Earth (1939), which earned an Academy Award nomination and reportedly was in consideration for a Nobel Peace Prize, and The Milky Way (1940), which broke Disney's Oscar winning streak and earned MGM its first Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. Sources: Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animation, Leonard Maltin. McGraw-Hill, 1980. "Interview: Hugh Harman," Michael Barrier. Michael Barrier.com, January 10, 2006. "Harman and Ising at MGM," Jerry Beck. Cartoon Research, May 25, 2013. IMDb By Sean Axmaker