While Hugh Harman & Rudolf Ising were often seen as Disney copycats and tended to make overly cutesy fodder in their time, they did grow from their usual tricks and make some short films that blended the sentimentality with a hint of cruelty and bitterness. Case in point, The Lost Chick works as a harsh fable about being too playful when you should be working to save yourself.
The primary story of a hen losing one of its eggs that ends up in the hands of two squirrels who think it's a nut establishes this moral from the get go, and while it might be easy to see the payoff coming, it nonetheless demonstrates how harsh of a lesson it is to go against the food you've collected for something you don't know of. The short itself does drag at points as it does spend a bit too much time on the squirrels trying to figure out what to do with the baby chick who hatches from the egg, but once the mother hen comes in to save her baby, the short takes a genuinely dark turn as the squirrels scramble to find food as winter sets in. It's a truly harrowing moment that is nonetheless benefited by a happy ending, but even at that, one could see it as salvation for the squirrels as they don't seem to have a mother or father.
Beyond the content, the art direction suits the late autumn atmosphere beautifully. Despite the short being processed in 2 strip Technicolor (or Cinecolor), the limited palettes allow the backgrounds and character designs to blend in suitably within the grim forest setting. Admittedly, the character designs are a bit unappealing for my tastes as they look cutesified to the point of looking ugly, but one could excuse Harman, Ising and their team as they were still learning how to make workable character designs around this time. That said, the chick itself is a delightful character on its own thanks to its design and movements, and the animators must have had fun making it work as a believable baby chicken that just happened to be animated. Scott Bradley's score is also a delightful contribution as it blends the soothing cute content with harsher melodies and choir gospels strongly.
With all of these contributing factors, The Lost Chick might be one of Harman & Ising's most underrated short films from their Happy Harmony series as it demonstrates their growth into more mature content from their typical slap happy juvenile output beforehand. While Harman himself would use this template for the arguably superior short film The Hungry Wolf years later, there's no denying that through this short, the two men were talented enough to progress beyond their humble beginnings and become admirable animation directors in their own right.
