However, the genre of social and political allegory became increasingly common. As animation developed, so did its visual style, taking inspiration from contemporary trends in the visual arts, such as cubism, surrealism and abstract expressionism. Polish animation is bold and experimental in its approach: artist duo Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica won the Grand Prize at the 1958 Brussels Experimental Film Festival with their grim, non-narrative short film Home (Dom, 1958). Along with Lenica’s award winning cut-out film Labyrinth (Labirynt, 1962), Home depicts people trapped in a repressed, surreal world, where omnipresent surveillance of a threatening system is in operation. The same overwhelmingly claustrophobic atmosphere appears in the Oscar-winning short film Tango (1981) by the experimental filmmaker Zbigniew Rybczynski. Based on cleverly assembled cut-out video loops shot from a static point of view, the film shows how an average living room gets occupied by 36 people over monotonous choreography of characters entering and exiting the room.

Puppet theatre is one of the most popular performing arts in Czech culture, and was even used as a way to keep the Czech language alive during the forced Germanisation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Originally a puppeteer and illustrator, Jiri Trnka became the most influential artist among the animators in Prague after 1945. His last short puppet film, The Hand (Ruka, 1965) features a large ,live-action hand, which invades the home of a marionette potter, demanding that the defenseless wooden puppet depict him. The film is widely read as a parable about the mechanisms of oppression, which thanks to being open to various interpretations, was read as a protest against the foreign (Nazi or Western) enemies of socialism by the Soviet censors. At international film festivals, however, it was celebrated as an allegory about the totalitarian Soviet control over the arts.