Well, those links don't seem to really work. But I'll say that animation--in the case of Sleeping Beauty--doesn't photograph in the same way that live-action does when discussing depth. In live-action, its a 3d space captured 2-dimensionally--but animation is a 2-d space captured 2-dimensionally. There was never any actual depth to begin with--its all simulated from the beginning. I'm not entirely sure how depth-of-field simulations work in animation, but my understanding is that its a composite effect of some kind. When I photograph a man standing in front of a building, the building is actually ten feet behind him and thus the depth of field actually falls off in a genuine way, but in animation the BG is not actually ten feet behind the subject, its all flat to begin with.

Or am I misunderstanding what you are asking? As far as Lowry goes, I'm not sure how much this effects the qualities you are talking about, unless you are basing your point off pre- and post-Lowry comparisons (again, I can't see the examples you posted so maybe I'm misunderstanding things here). The sort of "blurryness" of the human eye is different than a camera lens just because of the way the eye works, maybe you are right in that there is this indefinable subtle "texture" to the BG in shallow-depth-of-field in real life, caused by some sort of biological phenomena, that makes film grain seem more familiar (but, on the flip side, the amount of film grain visible in a lot of movies is way, way beyond any sort of real-life "texture", and it doesn't just apply to out-of-focus objects but the entire uniform image, which is clearly unnatural from real life).