The film is directed (uncredited) by Hugh Harman, who had created MGM's first animation unit with Rudolph Ising in the 1930s, and produced by Harman and Fred Quimby, who had taken over as head of MGM animation unit and made a great success of it, both critically and financially. Quimby produced the "Tom and Jerry" series (created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera), which won seven Academy Awards under his stewardship, but he left the creative side to the animators and directors such as Harmon. On The Hungry Wolf, Harmon worked with Vladimir "Bill" Tytla, the animation director on Disney's Pinocchio (1940) and Dumbo (1941). Though Tytla (like most animators) is uncredited on the film, his distinctive character design and animation gives the wolf an unusually complex character for an eight-minute short and creates sympathy for a character that is generally left to play the stock villain. The wolf is voiced (uncredited) by the great Mel Blanc, the legendary voice artist who gave us Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and dozens of distinctive animated characters in movies, on TV, and on the radio.
Among the highlights of the short is a sequence of hunger-induced hallucinations that channel a similar scene from Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush but with a visual payoff possible only in an animated short. See what gnawing hungrily on an ear of corn becomes into when it turns out to be a wooden rolling pin. Even Chaplin wouldn't mess with those splinters.
The Hungry Wolf was Harman's final film for MGM. He left the studio to produce training films for the Army during the war and then reunited with his former partner, Rudolph Ising, to form their own production company.
By Sean Axmaker
Sources:
Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animation, Leonard Maltin. McGraw-Hill, 1980.
"Harman and Ising at MGM," Jerry Beck. Cartoon Research, May 25, 2013.
"Tytla's Hungry Wolf," Michael Sporn. Michael Sporn Animation, July 5, 2011.
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