The expression "The devil is in the details" doesn't ring true to those involved in the genre of film-making known as stop-motion animation. The time-consuming, labor-intensive process is made up of thousands of tiny elements, some as small as the individual hairs on a puppet's head.

For Georgina Hayns, puppet fabrication supervisor for the recently released stop-motion film "Coraline," the details are what make her job interesting. She worked for three years with a team of about 60 people to produce the 100-minute film, directed by Henry Selick.

"It was an amazing challenge - the detail of it was just wonderful," Hayns said, adding that Selick's exacting standards were a source of motivation, rather than frustration.

"That's what we're all specialists in, so we were saying, yeah, more detail!" she said.

The film, released in February, makes a return visit to Juneau this weekend to play at the Goldtown Nickelodeon theater. The showing corresponds with a visit from Hayns and her colleague, Mark Gaiero, also from the Portland-based film studio Laika. The pair will give a lecture at 7 p.m. Saturday at the downtown library, and lead a four-hour, hands-on puppet fabrication workshop at 1 p.m. Sunday at the Douglas library.

"We'll try to cram three years into four hours," Hayns said, adding that each participant will leave with their own basic armature, or puppet skeleton.

Pat Race, president of JUMP society and partner in Lucid Reverie, worked with the Friends of the Library to make the visit possible.

The artistry involved in the film, and the creepy plot, makes "Coraline" a movie for adults as well as kids. Taken from a novella by Neil Gaiman, author of "American Gods" among other works, the story involves an 11-year-old girl who discovers a tunnel in her house that leads to an alternate world. There she encounters a second set of parents who are very excited by her arrival and do not want her to leave. The Other Mother, in particular, becomes quite menacing in her attempts to get what she wants.

Hayns, who said she grew up reading Grimm's Fairy Tales, said that it isn't frightening in a troubling way.

"You get a bit scared but then it all works out," she said. "I think that kind of scaring kids is natural."

Stop-motion animation, like 2-D animation, involves stringing single frames together to create the appearance of motion. But whereas 2-D animation involves drawings, stop-motion involves the physical manipulation of tangible objects, such as puppets.

Well-known examples of the technique in the U.S. are the classic Christmas specials "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" (1964) and "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town," (1970), as well as Gumby. More recent examples include Tim Burton's "Corpse Bride" and Burton and Selick's "James and the Giant Peach."

Part of the difference between stop-motion and computer-generated imagery ("Toy Story" et al) is that it has a less polished, textural look. Almost everything that appears on screen was created from scratch, from the puppets' skeletons (or armatures, as they are called) and clothing, to the furniture and sets.

"Everything had a human hand on it," Hayns said.

This movement away from computer screens toward fabric and scissors could be construed as old-fashioned if it weren't for the fact that the movie also incorporated state-of the art technology to help them along.

For example, some puppets were created with rapid prototyping, a technique that allows printing of 3-D objects. Coraline's face was made up of 320 interchangeable molds of different eyebrow and forehead expressions and 650 different mouth molds, all of them printed with rapid prototyping.

"Its similar to an ink-jet printer, but instead of layers of color, its (building up) layers of resin," Hayns said.

This technique gave the puppet-makers a huge advantage in terms of the number of facial expressions they could create and made more subtle and gradual changes possible. Kris Kringle could have benefited from such nuances.

Other aspects of creating the puppets involved sewing tiny articles of clothing. In most animated films the characters just wear one outfit, but for Selick this was not realistic enough.

"Henry was really keen to depict the passage of time, so as each day passes (Coraline's) wearing a different outfit," Hayns said, adding that a few outfits required the construction of completely different armatures.

Many of the puppets had to be created several times over, as their fragility caused them to wear out quickly. In the case of Coraline, 28 separate puppets were fabricated.