Okay, so Star Wars is now officially a kid’s movie. George Lucas’ newest cash-in on the Star Wars saga is a wholly unnecessary cartoon which caters to a much younger audience, but one that will find the majority of the story entirely incomprehensible.

The Star Wars films made a sharp turn to the digital realm starting with the release of The Phantom Menace in 1999, and they now have made the full transition to being fully animated. And by the way, I noticed that The Clone Wars is being advertised as the “first” fully animated Star Wars film. If they go nuts with the sequels, I sure hope they get better!

The story takes place between Episode II and Episode III. The Republic is at war with the Separatists and its access to the Galactic Rim is being threatened. Complicating the problem is that diplomatic relationships are strained to the extreme because Jabba the Hutt’s son (yes, he has a son now) has been kidnapped, and due to some carefully orchestrated misinformation, he suspects the Jedi.

Confused yet? Imagine how the kids feel! But it doesn’t matter because everything else in the movie is there just for them. There’s a cutesy little teenie bopper apprentice named Ashoka assigned to tag along with Anakin and learn all she can from him about the Jedi ways. Lending her voice to the character is Ashley Eckstein, who, get this, is probably best known as Muffy from “That’s So Raven.” What the hell is happening here? That’s So Raven?!

I have no problem with child stars moving on from their kiddie roles and into more serious acting, but the problem is that Eckstein takes that step in The Clone Wars, but doesn’t do anything different. Her character is like a little kid running around through a story that is attempting to be a Star Wars movie, but it can’t because she keeps re-naming things and people (Skyguy??), and (barring the occasional bout of astonishing light saber moves and tricks with using ‘The Force’) generally behaving as if she’s still acting in a show made for girls under age 10.

Jabba the Hutt found someone willing to let him put a baby in her.

For example, most of her role in the movie is not as a Jedi apprentice, but a babysitter of Jabba’s offspring, the “Huttlet,” as he is affectionately called throughout the movie. A few years ago I saw a documentary about the history of the adult film industry, in which Ron Jeremy presented his hairy, pot-bellied self as proof that any guy in the world can get laid. Now, it seems that more recent evidence of this theory has come to light. Jabba the Hutt, in all his slithery, gelatinous glory, has managed to seduce himself a hottie the Hutt and partake in that great wonder of procreation. It’s strange to consider that if Mama the Hutt had been included in the movie, it probably would have made the entire film a complete joke. But not to miss an opportunity to slip something asinine into the movie, Lucas has Jabba refer to his beloved son (during a serious negotiation meeting) through a translator as his “little punkey muffin.”

But fear not, the Huttlet is more than enough of a spectacle. He looks like a sperm the size and color of a watermelon with orange eyes and a mouth. Punkey muffin, indeed. And therein lies the problem with the entire movie. Everything in it is a stupid joke, like Lucas is just laughing at himself and the world he created. It’s all just a story to him now and he’s just goofing off. Here’s a sample of dialogue between two of his idiot droids during a heated battle:

The B1, Class 4 droid. Not the sharpest tool in the shed...

Droid #1: “Concentrate fire on sector 11374465!”
Droid #2: “Uh, 117, um, 3 uh…..what?”
Droid #1: “Just shoot right there!”

I had been under the impression that droids were manufactured and therefore programmed. Do you mean to tell me that they are equipped with vague understandings of their battle commands and shoddy short term memories? That’s just piss poor planning!

But sadly, this interaction is representative of the rest of the movie. All serious story-telling is sacrificed for dumb laughs. Little effort is put into doing anything interesting with the animation, which isn’t even very impressive, and the real Star Wars story is a distant backdrop to this goofy babysitting/kidnapping story about Jabba’s babbling son.

Oh and one more thing. The final nail in the coffin of The Clone Wars is Jabba the Hutt’s uncle who, judging mostly by his voice, can only be described as a gay black nightclub owner with phosphorescent blacklight tattoos all over his purple body. What the hell?!

I was unimpressed with The Phantom Menace when it was released almost ten years ago, but it was still a serious installment in the Star Wars series. The Clone Wars, on the other hand, never takes itself seriously, and is too obviously an advertisement for the television series and, possibly even more, the inevitable video game. Most of the battle sequences are so video game-like that my thumbs started twitching for want of a controller. Skip this one. Go see Tropic Thunder or Pineapple Express instead.

A brooding Yoda laments the loss of a time when he occupied physical space.