Using analytic tools developed by the literary critic, James Phelan, the author investigates frame narrative organization in three animated films. Zbig Rybczynski’s Tango uses addition and subtraction to frame mini-stories layered one over the other; Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis’s When the Day Breaks uses an A–B–A structure with repetitive events mirroring and revealing each other; and Yuri Norstein’s Tale of Tales uses character narrators that serve as observer/participants, allowing the film to cross narrative genres. This article also investigates the layered viewer response that frame narration requires. All three animations, while not digitally produced, demonstrate the ontological montage Lev Manovich ascribes to the aesthetic logic of digital compositing, which he maintains is layered and ‘first and foremost a conceptual [and] not only a technological operation’.