Describe the movie, “Chicago 10,” to people who have not yet seen it, and they will invariably try to compartmentalize the thing. Is it a documentary? A cartoon? A nostalgic tribute to the activists of the 1960s? A rallying cry for intensified activism today?

“Yeah, this definitely isn’t your standard, PBS documentary,” the film’s director, Brett Morgen, said recently. “It all started with a subject that interested me, but I really wasn’t sure how I was going to get my hands around it. And then I read a quote from Jerry Rubin about Abbie Hoffman, that the whole trial ‘was a cartoon show,’ and something just clicked. I thought, ‘Let’s just animate this thing, and draw attention to just how big a circus this trial had become.'”

The trial that so captivated Mr. Morgen played out in the immediate aftermath of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, an absurd courtroom spectacle in which government lawyers sought to pin responsibility for the violent anti-Vietnam War protest on two handfuls of anti-war activists. The Chicago Seven, as the group was known, was charged with conspiracy, inciting to riot, and other crimes stemming from the violence that flared outside the convention.

In particular, Mr. Morgen’s movie turns its focus to Rubin and Hoffman, self-described “yippie” (Youth International Party) activists who, prior to the convention, had applied to the city for permits to hold their own outdoor convention. Denied flatly by officials, they showed up anyway in hopes of rallying 100,000 people to a youth convention that would take place in city parks mere blocks from the convention hall. What happened next became one of the most notorious chapters in American history, with the young political left forging ahead in the eyes of some and alienating itself in the eyes of others. When the police marched on the uninvited guests and the sparks were struck for the fiery confrontations that would be captured on national television, Walter Cronkite famously referred to the images as being like those from “a police state.”

Jumping among those turbulent days in the Windy City, “Chicago 10” pushes forward along the timeline to the days of the trial, as well as backward to the origins of Rubin and Hoffman’s preparations. The film traces the origins of these Midwestern protests to their very first brainstorming sessions. Yet it’s not only the structure of “Chicago 10” that has captivated early audiences (the film was the opening night selection of the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and will make its premiere on New York screens this Friday), but also its unusual aesthetic. As a contrast to an impressive array of archival footage, the courtroom scenes that restore these young activists to life are colorfully animated, utilizing a motion-capture technique that lends the re-enactments a visual style similar to the one Richard Linklater used in “Waking Life” and “A Scanner Darkly.”

Behind these pastel colors, a group of A-list Hollywood heavyweights (including Hank Azaria, Liev Schreiber, Nick Nolte, and Mark Ruffalo) performs a partial reading of the court’s transcripts, essentially reconstructing the proceedings.

It’s safe to say that no one has ever seen a historical documentary shot quite this way — live-action mixed with animation, grainy archival footage juxtaposed with polished Hollywood impersonations. “But that’s exactly the point,” Mr. Morgen said. “You want audiences to experience this story, not just to sit through a dry recital of the facts, and the animation clearly helps to fulfill that goal. One of the things I like to say is that if you want to know the history of what happened in Chicago so long ago, then read a book. In 800 pages, you can get all the necessary context. But if you want the experience in a very visceral manner, and to sense the flavor of just who the Chicago 10 were, then this is the film for you.”

In this, the 40th anniversary year of the Chicago convention, Mr. Morgen isn’t shy about tethering the film to the landscape of today’s America. Having been born in 1968, the director clearly did not experience the energy of the anti-war movement at its most engaged. But he is a child of that movement, and the more he came to appreciate the empowered mentality of those few organizers (“One thing people lose sight of,” he said, “is the way that this started as just two guys smoking a joint on the Lower East Side and ended up becoming a watershed moment for a generation”), the more dismayed he became about the unfocused state of today’s anti-war movement.

“Some people might feel like this convention happened recently, that this is a chapter of recent history, but if you’re under the age of 50, you know almost nothing about it,” he said. “Those in their 20s today have no idea of how much these people were able to accomplish.”

That said, it wasn’t just the subject matter that intrigued actors such as Messrs. Azaria and Nolte to sign on to a project that, Mr. Morgen admits, paid little. It was also the director’s previous success with his 2002 film “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” a movie widely respected in Hollywood as much for its substance as for its unique documentary style. In “Kid,” Mr. Morgen used the producer Robert Evans, the film’s subject, as its self-analytical narrator. Similarly, in “Chicago 10,” he rejected the talking-head structure of the television news magazine and let his subjects do the talking instead.

“These are all primary sources, which is something you don’t often see in documentaries,” Mr. Morgen said. “We obviously haven’t created any new archival footage, and all of the courtroom dialogue is ripped straight from the transcript. And I think that bringing these words to life, rather than relying on talking heads to recall or remember, is essential. When I was at Hampshire College, Ken Burns visited and he said something about the making of ‘The Civil War’ that stuck with me: History throughout time was always presented in the oral tradition, around campfires and in the form of myths, and as it passed down from one generation to the next it evolved from story to mythology. It was something organic and interactive. We need to return to that place where history isn’t just academic and rigorous but vibrant and exciting and alive.”

ssnyder@nysun.com