Change color with animation

Is there a easy way to change color with animation?
The animate function takes a double so if we are going to use the rgb format we need 3 animations. One for each color channel. We also need to convert the channels to a 0-1 range.

I can see that the color can be described as a UInt. Would it be possible to convert rgb/rgba to UInt and use that as the parameter for animate?
If yes, how do I convert rgb/rgba to UInt and back to rgb again?