Page "William Hanna" Paragraph 4

After dropping out of college, Hanna worked briefly as a construction engineer and helped build the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood.

He lost that job during the Great Depression and found another at a car wash. His sister's boyfriend encouraged him to apply for a job at Pacific Title and Art, which produced title cards for motion pictures.

While working there, Hanna's talent for drawing became evident, and in 1930 he joined the Harman and Ising animation studio, which had created the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series.

Despite a lack of formal training, Hanna soon became head of their ink and paint department.

Besides inking and painting, Hanna also wrote songs and lyrics.

For the first several years of Hanna's employment, the studio partnered with Pacific Title and Art's Leon Schlesinger, who released the Harman-Ising output through Warner Bros.

When Hugh Harman and Rudolph Ising chose to break with Schlesinger and begin producing cartoons independently for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer ( MGM ) in 1933, Hanna was one of the employees who followed them.