[3] When Disney moved operations to California, Harman was back at United Film Ad Service and Ising had a photofinishing business.
Their plans went nowhere, however, and the men soon came back to Disney on June 22, 1925, to work on his Alice Comedies and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit films.
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.[5] 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.
[6] Harman and Ising had long aspired to start their own studio, and had created and copyrighted the cartoon character Bosko in 1928.
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).
When the new Happy Harmonies series ran significantly over-budget in 1937, MGM fired Harman and Ising and established its own in-house studio, which was founded and headed by Fred Quimby.
In 1939, Harman created Peace on Earth, a downbeat morality tale about two squirrels discovering the evils of humanity, which was nominated for an Oscar.
[13][14] In 1960, Harman-Ising produced a pilot episode for a made for TV cartoon series titled The Adventures of Sir Gee Whiz on the Other Side of the Moon.
[17] Their repeated attempts to make quality cartoons and their refusal to be bound by budgets led to numerous disputes with their producers.
Ising and Harman were portrayed in the feature film Walt Before Mickey by David Henrie and Hunter Gomez.