He's already been rewarded with critical praise and a huge audience response to his hit 3-D stop-motion animated film "Coraline," but for acclaimed filmmaker Henry Selick, the honors keep on pouring in.

The latest is the Tex Avery Animation Award, which Selick will receive Tuesday night in Texas at the American Film Institute's Dallas International Film Festival

It's a satisfying award for writer-director Selick, who previously helmed the classics "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and "James and the Giant Peach," since it's named for Avery -- the late, legendary animator behind such characters as Daffy Duck, Droopy and Chilly Willy. Avery is also credited with coining the famed Bugs Bunny phrase, "What's Up, Doc?"

"The award came out of the blue -- I wasn't expecting it," Selick said in an @ The Movies interview Tuesday. "Certainly, for Hollywood animated short films, Tex was the best. There was no one more inventive than at sight gags. His stuff stands the test of time, just like the best of Warner Bros. animation, Chuck Jones, Fritz Freleng, Hanna-Barbera, Tex is in there and right at the top."

Based on the novel by heralded fantasy author Neil Gaiman and featuring the voices of Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, Ian McShane and Keith David, "Coraline" has the distinction of being the first stop-motion movie filmed in 3-D. The film was a labor of love four years in the making for Selick, who assembled an amazing crew of stop-motion artists -- a rare commodity in the film world these days given the domination of computer-generated animation.

But the scarcity of artists hardly spells out doom for the art form of stop-motion. In fact, Selick said, there are plenty of young people aspiring to be -- and have jobs -- as stop-motion artists.

"There are always young people who find stop-motion on their own. They just prefer working with their hands and touching real materials," Selick explained. "It's always hard to find a crew, but thankfully, there is the TV show 'Robot Chicken.' It's pretty racy, but it's funny, and it gives young animators with any talent the chance to get a job doing stop-motion. In fact, we got several of our youngest animators off that show. They show a lot of potential."

And while some artists make the leap from stop-motion to computer generation, Selick said it doesn't mean they're gone forever.

"There's a lot of stop-motion animators I know that have gone to CG and worked at Pixar, for example," Selick said. "But they either do their do their own stop-motion films on their own, or they just wait for the next feature to come along and then take a leave from Pixar."