Chicago Ten is a mix of actual film and animated recreations using the transcripts of the trial of Chicago Ten (voiced by actors)that happened in the aftermath of the 1968 Democratic convention in ... Chicago. What happened was that The Yippies and anti-war groups showed up to protest and they locked horns with Mayor Daley and his machine who were looking for a fight. Everyone knew it was going to happen and when the violence occurred there were arrests that set in motion the trial that is the subject of the film. The film itself is quite good. The animation puts us in the court room allows the words of everyone involved to hang themselves. To my eyes the establishment come off looking foolish and in many ways the Yippies do too (clearly they saw it all a a big game). It was a necessary evil in away but I really wish that there had been a better bunch of heroes.On a personal note, In a weird way the film left a bad taste in my mouth, not because it was a bad film, rather because I saw this right after seeing Chris Marker's Grin Without a Cat. Marker's film is a look at political protest in the world in the 1960's and 1970's and how the stakes were so much higher in say Prague where the Russians were coming to into crush the rebellion or in other places where people were dying for their beliefs. Seeing the antics of people like Abby Hoffman made me wonder how seriously the protesters were taking it.My own reflections on history aside, this is a very good film and should be seen by anyone who wants to know what happened in Chicago in 1968.

The Kid Stays in the Picture was a great documentary with a refreshing style that managed to keep me hooked into a subject that I honestly wasn't very interested in. So I was extremely excited to see Brett Morgen creating this documentary about history that I was very interesting in and.. Well, Morgen probably reached a little too far on this one.This documentary is a mix of the very powerful archive footage of the demonstrations and events leading up to them, and a rather insipid animated recreation of the trial. There are no retrospective interviews (many of the 8 are now deceased) and there is no narration - both omissions that suit the style of the director and help emphasize the time and place of the events.The archive footage could possibly have carried the film by itself. But this documentary is also about the trial. Without any footage or audio of the trial, how do you recreate it so that it appears as the farce that it was - while doing justice to the amazing news footage of protesters being maced and beaten? To do so would honestly have been an amazing accomplishment. Animating the trial was a bold move, but the end result is visually inadequate and mixes poorly with the news footage.I have no problem with the use of animation, but the animation itself is of very low quality and isn't rather creative. For the trial scenes, I believe the intention was to create a comic look and feel to highlight the nature of the trial itself - but the uninspired designs are too smoothly rendered with wooden mo-cap movement that appears borderline uncanny valley. Other demonstration scenes were animated in a hand drawn/cut out style at an extremely jerky 3-4 frames per second that is difficult to watch to say the least - thankfully they are short. The one redeeming quality of the animation is the voice acting which is top notch across the board, even if Hank Azaria's Abbie Hoffman sounds a lot like Moe from The Simpsons.My other complaint is the soundtrack, which is about half a mix of 90's rap and another half a mixed bag of pop and metal. The music has no connection to time or events and seems to only take away from the authenticity of the events. I've read the interviews where Morgen describes this movie as being about now, and not 1968 - but I think that is a disservice to the Chicago 8. Sure, there is a war going on right now as was then - but in 2008 young people are more likely to protest high gas prices than the current war.

If you can't always get real footage, create your own. Brett Morgen revisited the courtroom of the Chicago 7's 1968 trial as truthfully as possible, a lesson every film maker should take. Mr. Morgen paid full respect to the 7 revolutionaries (David Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman "a sort of rock star", William Kunstler, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, and Leonard Weinglass) who went to jail for their "thought crimes". I asked myself, how many people do you know who would go to jail for what they believe in today? In showing actual found footage, leading from the beginning of the democratic convention up until their arrest and sentence a year later as well as animation inside the courtroom, we see the power of the people at its best. The use of animation was a new and maybe risky way to show the insides of the courtroom, some will hate it and some will love it, but to me it goes along with the reality of what happened in the park/streets/etc, vs. the surreality and of the courtroom. It also ties in to the fact that we usually just see a drawing of a courtroom, which is pretty dull in comparison to the use of animation here. I can only assume that few will understand the use of motion capture (It's not rotoscope!), or be inspired to try it in their films, and less will see it as problematic in the film. Regarding the authenticity of the courtroom scenes, those scenes were taken from actual transcripts and accounts. The radio phone calls Hoffman made relaying the trial were clearly real sound bytes. Regarding the soundtrack, the only song that I had a bias against was Eminem's, but I was surprised at how well it actually did work with this film's ideals, (although in reality I have never felt like standing up and protesting after hearing an Eminem song). Maybe this film will give Eminem's work a new meaning :) who knows. If you don't know the history or weren't around for this event, (as I wasn't), than you should definitely read up on it before or after seeing this film. Activism is a dying art!!!...I loved what Brett said in his Q+A- "Film making is my way of protesting", something to that extent. Right on.

I just attended a screening of Chicago 10 at Sundance. Wow. What a unique and important movie. The mix of archival footage and animation blend together much better than I anticipated. The animated scenes are primarily courtroom scenes. The dialog during the animated courtroom scenes are taken directly from the court transcripts. The soundtrack is perfect. There is a combination of old and new including songs from contemporary artists such as Rage Against The Machine & Eminem. Although archival footage was used, and court transcripts were used as dialog, I'm not too sure that I'd call this film a documentary. This film was moving, powerful, and well worth seeing. I thought that the film was such a gem that I'm trying to get a tickets to see it again during the festival.