'Clone Wars' is lighter and more cartoonish than live-action films

You'll know you're in a different galaxy in seconds as "Star Wars: The Clone Wars," substitutes the Warner Bros. logo and theme music for the 20th Century Fox searchlight and fanfare.

While hard-core "Star Wars" fans still will welcome it, the saga returns to theaters as a cartoon.

George Lucas' prequel trilogy was so overloaded with computer-generated imagery that the digital animation of "Clone Wars" isn't much of a leap. The somber tone of those three movies -- chronicling the downfall of Anakin Skywalker from snotty teen to black-hearted Darth Vader -- is gone, replaced with a variation of the original trilogy's campy humor and camaraderie. Still, a "Star Wars" movie should be an event, and "Clone Wars" definitely is not.

For fans, it serves as a fairly promising introduction to the "Clone Wars" animated series debuting on Cartoon Network this fall. The movie centers on a fresh adventure of Anakin and his Jedi knight elder, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and sets up a seemingly bottomless well of story possibilities for the TV show. There are plenty of returning characters, new faces and bit players around which to build episodes, so the series may not be merely 'Droids-vs.-Clones battles.

"Clone Wars" adapts a tale that director Dave Filoni (also the supervising director of the TV show) and company had been developing for the small screen.

Anakin (voiced by Matt Lanter) and Obi-Wan (James Arnold Taylor) lead a band of the Republic's clone soldiers against the comically inept android troops of a separatist movement led by evil Count Dooku (Christopher Lee, reprising his live role).

To show Anakin's soft pre-Vader side, he's given his own Jedi apprentice, Ahsoka Tano (Ashley Eckstein), a spunky alien girl who quickly forges a wisecracking bond with her usually stoic mentor.

They are assigned to lead a rescue of giant slug crime lord Jabba the Hutt's squishy, squirmy baby, who has been kidnapped in a conspiracy that gives all our familiar prequel heroes a part to play.

While the movie has a huge body count as ray guns and light sabers flash, Lucas turns his gang loose to be merry, even silly. In theaters, it makes for a reasonably fun if generally forgettable story, at least in terms of the grand-opera standards of the live-action "Star Wars" films.

- By David Germain / Associated Press

Star Wars: The Clone Wars

Rating: 2 and a half stars (out of four)

Cast: Anthony Daniels, Matthew Wood.

Running time: 98 minutes.

Rated: PG; sci-fi action violence throughout, brief language and momentary smoking