Animals in La Fontaine and in Modern Cinema: From Allegory to Anthropomorphic Polyphony The combination of the name of the French fabulist Jean de La Fontaine (1621–1695) with the phenomenon of modern cinema at first glance seems anachronistic. However, it was La Fontaine, who systematized and elevated the allegorical model of animal use to an artistic norm, that laid the foundation for their subsequent representation in mass culture, including cinema. A comparative analysis of his method with the practices of modern cinema demonstrates both the continuity of tradition and its radical transformation in the postmodern era. 1. La Fontaine: animals as rhetorical masks and social types. In La Fontaine, animals are primarily fixed allegories of human qualities and class characteristics inherited from the ancient (Aesop) and eastern traditions. Their images lack individual psychology and serve strictly didactic purposes: The lion — an allegory of royal power, strength, but also tyranny. The fox — the embodiment of cunning, flattery, and a sly mind. The wolf — a symbol of predation, brute strength, and eternal hunger (both social and physical). The ass — the personification of foolishness, obstinacy, and ignorance. The animals in La Fontaine speak in the refined language of the XVII-century high society salons, their dialogues are full of irony and elegance. They are not characters in the modern sense, but functions in a moral fable. Their animal nature serves only as a conditional mask, behind which lies an immutable human essence. The task is not to explore the inner world of the animal, but to illustrate a universal moral law. 2. Modern cinema: from psychologization to mask deconstruction. In the 20th–21st centuries, cinema, especially in the genre of animation, inherits the La Fontainian model but fundamentally reinterprets it. Several key directions can be identified: A) Psychologization and individualization (Disney and his successors).The Golden Age of Disney ("The ... Read more