Ray Goes Krazy

Not being a Disney-phile, I associate Ray Huffine’s name with the Walter Lantz studio, where he took over from Ray Jacobs. His first cartoon was U-113 Hunger Strife (1960), directed by former Disney veteran Jack Hannah (title card to the right) and he continued to work for Lantz until a year before his death. Huffine was in Hannah’s unit with animator Al Coe at Disney and when the studio broke it up, the three ended up at Lantz.

Before Disney, Huffine was employed by Charlie Mintz. He was interviewed by his hometown paper, The Montana Standard, which published this story on February 8, 1934.

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's 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 home 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[s], 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."

Huffine’s watercolours were exhibited in the Los Angeles area; one October 1937 showing at a bookstore was announced in a newspaper story, with word that he was now employed by Walt Disney. Another in 1942 was for the war effort; it raised money for the Red Cross. A story in the Nov. 1942 edition of Screenland revealed he painted Disney characters on the walls of the girl’s bedroom in Dennis Morgan’s home.

The most interesting story about Huffine appeared on the wire in 1940. I can’t find the original story, but came across this re-write on the woman’s page of the Miami Daily News of Nov. 29, 1940.

Ideas born through necessity are often the most lasting. For instance, here's a story of how a color came into being sent by the United Press. A jar of Mrs. Huffine's boysenberry jam has made history. It all happened like this: Ray Huffine—Mrs. Huffine's husband—was sulking and fuming around his studio room one day. The studio happened to be one of those on the Walt Disney lot in Hollywood. Mr. Huffine is an animator for Disney.
This particular day Huffine was baffled completely in his search for a new and different color. He needed it for a certain layout in the Beethoven "pastoral" scene of Fantasia. Fantasia was then in the making.
So he paced the floor munching all the while at sandwiches from his lunch box, and, occasionally, dips into the jam jar. That was all the inspiration he needed. He smeared a delicate boysenberry wash over the background and results were highly satisfactory. The celluloids shot over the background didn't stick to the jam, either.
And so Mrs. Huffine's boysenberry color takes its place with the herb - root - berry - vegetable tints of the old masters.

Huffine was born in Missouri on October 12, 1905. After graduation, he was a bookkeeper for a glassware company in Butte in 1925, living at the YMCA. Disney evidently paid him well; the 1940 Census shows he had a maid. He took time away from animation during the war, working as a ship builder. If you see the name Charlotte Darling or Charlotte Huffine in animation circles, that was his second wife. They were married in 1959. His first wife, Beulah, ran a ballet studio. He died November 4, 1967.