The Background Behind Scrappy

Want to know who is responsible for the backgrounds in the Scrappy and Krazy Kat cartoons of the mid 1930s? Don’t look at the screen. You won’t find it there.

In a way, it’s a shame that many of the artists who worked on cartoons in that decade got no credit, especially the ones who painted backgrounds. Perhaps it’s just as well. Art Davis once remarked the Charles Mintz cartoons released by Columbia never had accurate credits anyway, a fact echoed at other studios.

However, the answer to our question can be found in the Montana Standard newspaper of Butte on February 8, 1934. It’s a name associated with Walt Disney and Walter Lantz.

Ex-Butte Youth Discloses Secrets of Krazy Kat and His Companions of Screen
How Krazy Kat and that comic strip boy-character, Scrappy, are sent through their capers across a motion picture screen to amuse theater-goers throughout the nation was explained yesterday afternoon by Ray Huffine of Los Angeles, a former Butte youth who made good in the movie capital.
Mr. Huffine, art editor of Butte public high school annual, The Mountaineer, in 1923, now is manager of the background art department of the Charles B. Mintz Cartoon studio, which distributes Krazy Kat and Scrappy cartoons through Columbia Pictures. With his wife, a California young woman enjoying her first visit to the Treasure state, he has been spending a two-week vacation at the ranch borne of his parents, Mr and Mrs. Walter Huffine, near Bozeman. The two will leave by car this morning on their return to Hollywood.
At his room at the Leggat hotel yesterday the young artist exhibited a number of samples of his work, and explained that his position with the studio was similar to that of the director of the scenic department of the average motion picture plant.

“My three assistants and I prepare the setting or background for the cartoons,” he said. “There are from 40 to 50 scenes in a 7-minute, 700-foot cartoon, and it takes about 13 days to complete a set of backgrounds. We put out 13 sets of each cartoons, or about 26 pictures a year.”
Guiding Krazy along his adventurous course is not so simple a task as it appears on the screen, Mr. Huffine pointed out. First, the “continuity and gags” are worked out, and then the music is filled in so that the story may be timed and the characters animated to each musical beat.
After this, “animators,” using thin sheets of paper over a strong light, trace out the characters in the extremes of action, such as at the start, high point and finish of a jump. “In-betweeners” handle the tedious detail of drawing the thousands of intermediate films, of which, as many as 10,000 are necessary in one film.
These characters, in their 10,000 changed position [sic], are then photographed over the appropriate backgrounds prepared by Mr. Huffine and his staff. “In pictures where Scrappy appears to be dashing along past a variety of scenery,” Mr. Huffine said, “the figure actually is remaining in the same spot and the background, in the form of a long roll or panorama, is moving past instead.”

Raymond Walter Huffine was born on October 12, 1905 in Garland, Missouri to Walter R. and Eva (Chezem) Huffine. His father had a farm. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was 5 and the family moved to Montana, where his dad worked as a teamster.

After graduation from high school, Ray worked as a clerk in Butte for the Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph Company. The site artask.com says Huffine moved to Los Angeles in 1927 and studied at the Otis Art Institute. The City Directory of 1930 states he worked as a clerk, apparently in a hotel.

When he began work for Mintz remains to be discovered. He was at the studio in 1933 when he got married (in 1959 he married again to Charlotte Darling Adams, who spent years in the animation industry). Meanwhile, Walt Disney needed artists with a feature on the horizon. Huffine was hired. The Great Falls Tribune of March 29, 1938 reveals:

Former Bozeman Youth Painted Some Scenes In "Snow White" Film BOZEMAN, March 28.—(Special). To most threater goers [sic], "Snow White And the Seven Dwarfs," famous animated cartoon, will be just a good movie, but to Bozemanites who once knew a lad named Ray Huffine who attended grade school here, the film will have additional interest. For Huffine, son of Mr. and Mrs. Ray Huffine, painted several of the scenes in the film at his easel in the studios of Walt Disney in Hollywood. Huffine has worked in Hollywood nearly a decade and has been employed in the Disney studios several years. His parents live five miles north of Bozeman on the Springhill road.

Huffine was also a fine arts painter and had a showing of water colours at a gallery in Los Angeles as early as 1935. He was also involved in union activity, but not where you might expect. He was a Steward of the American Federation of Musicians, Local 47, which represented film studio musicians (it appears Huffine played the sax in high school). In 1947, he was appointed the local’s tax collector and fired in 1951 when the candidate he backed for local president lost.

Huffine provided backgrounds for all the early Disney features—Pinocchio, Bambi, Dumbo—up until Lady and the Tramp. Oddly, he doesn’t appear to have been employed on Sleeping Beauty and left the studio before it was released. What he did for the next few years is unknown, but he was hired at the Walter Lantz studio by early 1960. Huffine’s last work there was on a 1968 Woody Woodpecker cartoon called One Horse Town.

By then, Huffine was gone. He died at the comparatively early age of 62 on November 4, 1967.