For those of you who complained that the three Star Wars prequels felt too much like cartoons, Star Wars: The Clone Wars should feel like a natural progression in the franchise.  

Set between Episodes II (Attack of the Clones) and III (Revenge of the Sith), Clone Wars starts with a faux newsreel catching us up to speed: Generals Anakin Skywalker (Matt Lanter), and Obi Wan Kenobi (James Arnold Taylor) are fighting Count Dooku's droid army to a standstill; Jabba the Hutt's son has been kidnapped, and the Jedi are tasked to find him. On the way, we get to see a little how an army of millions of clone troopers differentiate themselves (different haircuts), Anakin gets a spunky young Padawan learner (Ahsoka Tano, voiced by Ashley Eckstein, and the ostensible star of the movie), and we meet Jabba's gay uncle. Seriously.

The largest problems with The Clone Wars lie not in the movie, but with the direction of the series: The universe is too small, and ultimately, the focus seems to be on creating toys rather than characters. However, if you can get past all of that, The Clone Wars manages to improve on the prequel trilogy in subtle ways.

For one, it's far easier to see how the animated Anakin, who has dark circles around his eyes and a permanent scowl, is struggling between his Dark and Light sides, moreso than the petulant pretty boy played by Hayden Christensen in the prequels. But plot is almost secondary to massive, fluidly staged battle sequences: A vertical battle up a thousand foot tall cliff wall is appropriately dizzying and visually stunning; the droids and clone troopers look like they were lifted directly from the live action movies. The kiddie humor, which seemed so shoehorned into the prequel trilogy, works here --  the battle droids constant vaudevillain back and forth makes perfect sense in the cartoon context.

Because of all this, it's almost not worth getting upset about a Poochie like Ahsoka Tano, when the Star Wars movies have seen more than their fair share of Poochies. For those of you not familiar, Poochie is a character from one episode of The Simpsons, created specifically to be extreme, cool, and appeal to the kids. It's a metaphor for giving the audience what you think they want, rather than what they actually want, and it rarely, if ever works. It does not work here: Ahsoka is meant to appeal to young women, and bully for that, except that she doesn't add anything to the plot or movie.

But that's quibbling. Though this may seem like faint praise, Clone Wars is far better than it had any right to be. It doesn't reach the heights of the original trilogy. It doesn't even reach the superlative heights of Genndy Tartakovsky's similarly named Clone Wars series. But it does hold in step with the prequel trilogy, and even manages to wipe a bit of the bad taste from those films by staying true to what it is. It may not be the Star Wars we asked for, but it is the Star Wars we're going to get from now on.