Although overflow implicitly sets overflow-x and overflow-y they don't need to be the same value. You could hide the vertical overflow (overflow-y) while showing (or scrolling) the horizontal overflow (overflow-x). $.animate() kills this by setting overflow (instead of overflow-x and overflow-y). Preserving the original (possibly different) values of overflow-x and overflow-y, while still doing that (necessary) overflow hiding is fairly easy - see the attached diff.