It is maintained that to exploit fully the parallelism inherent in animate vision systems, an integrated vision architecture must support multiple models of parallelism. To support this claim, the hardware base of a typical animate vision laboratory and the software requirements of applications are described. A brief overview is then given of the Psyche operating system, which was designed to support multimodel programming. A complex animate vision application, checkers, constructed as a multimodel program under Psyche, is also described. Checkers demonstrates the advantages of decomposing animate vision systems by function and independently selecting an appropriate parallel-programming model for each function.