Node animations

We have a hand shape, which we want to animate the nodes of. I want to do this by rotating the knuckle nodes of this shape. To be able to animate it, we set the MaskNodeHandsOff for the knuckle nodes. And then I set the smNodeCurrentRotations for those nodes to the wantedd values, however, the shape starts looking weird, where the rest of the nodes under these knuckles (the fungers) move to strange places with strange rotations.

To be able to apply a nice rotation to a single node like a knuckle in this example, what exactly do we need to set(smCurrentRotations, ...), and which functions (animateSubtrees?) do we need to call?