“Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” the latest — and first digitally animated — feature-length addition to the “expanded universe” of narrative digressions from the mainline “Star Wars” saga, was directed by big-screen newcomer Dave Filoni and scripted by three veteran video-game and TV-animation writers. But the film, which makes its premiere Friday, also lists George Lucas as its executive producer and bears a story credit for the creator of the franchise and director of four of the six prior “Star Wars” outings. From the film’s opening moments, it is clear that Mr. Lucas’s participation was very hands-on.

As the film opens, a martial-drum-dominated version of the “Star Wars” theme and the inevitable bottom-to-top print crawl inform us that the Clone Wars, a conflict that originated as a throwaway line in the original 1977 film but was pushed to center stage in Mr. Lucas’s awkward prequels (“The Phantom Menace,” “Attack of the Clones,” and “Revenge of the Sith”) rages on. Physically stranded on the outer fringes of the contested galaxy, and chronologically located somewhere between the second and third prequels, Anakin Skywalker — still a Jedi knight in good standing and as yet unclaimed by the dark side of the Force — stands shoulder to shoulder with his mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and a battalion of Stormtrooper drones. Their enemy is a separatist robot army that would enslave the galaxy and topple the democratic Republic the Jedi have sworn to preserve.

All the while, Anakin is saddled with his own Padawan learner (Jedi for “sidekick”), Ahsoka Tano, an inevitably headstrong and brash young woman with a lot to learn and more to prove. Tasked with solving a kidnapping intrigue involving Jabba the Hutt’s missing child, the unfortunately named archfiend Count Dooku (one movie shy of a lightsaber beheading), and the Machiavellian manipulations of the Republic’s two-faced chancellor, Palpatine, Anakin and Ahsoka must learn to work together in order to outwit the count, appease the Hutt, and (temporarily at least) preserve something like democratic balance in the galaxy.

One of the most consistent aspects of the previous “Star Wars” outings has been the tendency for Mr. Lucas’s considerable cinematic skills to come alive primarily during sequences evoking the director’s hot-rod-racing youth and knack for freewheeling appropriation of shots and scenes from the films that inspired him. As the de facto occupant of the digital director’s chair, Mr. Filoni demonstrates a similarly crisp and confident sense of what to show, how to move, and where to hit the brakes in the multiple dogfights and chase scenes that punctuate the otherwise simplistic yet convoluted plot goings-on. Though much of the film, like its prequel peers, evokes the exotic but static imagery of science-fiction paperback covers from the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Filoni manages to goose up “The Clone Wars” with a welcome spaghetti-Western-esque emphasis on canted close-ups, darting eyes, and quick cuts.

Messrs. Lucas and Filoni have admitted that the look of “The Clone Wars” was inspired in part by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s 1960s science-fiction-action TV series “Thunderbirds,” a British import featuring marionettes that was ruthlessly satirized by Matt Stone and Trey Parker in “Team America: World Police.” Though short on the miniature, futuristic vehicles endlessly assembling, launching, crashing, and coupling that made vintage “Thunderbirds” seem like a lava lamp filled with hardware, the computer-generated characters in “The Clone Wars” do move with something like the old British series’ peculiar half-frozen puppet-string gaits.

It’s an odd choice, because if any strings were involved, they would have to be strings of programming code on the computers used to create and render these familiar personalities in a newfangled way. But the free-floating unreality of it all lends an agreeably clunky quality to a filmmaking process that is ordinarily more prone to antiseptic streamlining than to the backward-glancing visual anachronism on view here.

Another consistency in the “Star Wars” canon has been Mr. Lucas’s frankly appalling way with actors. From the first film in 1977 (the fourth, chronologically) to the last in 2005, great actors such as Alec Guinness and Ewan McGregor, hams such as Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, and casting oddities like Hayden Christensen have all spun their acting wheels equally ineffectually on the director’s watch. Consider it good news that this latest addition to the “Star Wars” family has been rendered in computer animation.

Ironically, given that it was created without flesh-and-blood people, “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” is arguably the most character-driven story yet to emerge from the prequel universe. As the film opens, Anakin Skywalker (voiced by Matt Lanter) seems as cardboard and annoying as his live-action counterpart. How any self-respecting writer (let alone three) can justify having a character sarcastically declare, “They’re baaaaaack,” as Anakin does shortly after the opening credits, remains one of cinema’s unsolved mysteries. But as the future Darth Vader bickers and bonds with his wisecracking pupil, Anakin develops flashes of a three-dimensional personality to go along with his hard-drive-generated physicality. The story may be a no-brainer, but at least “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” has some heart.

Those young or casual enough to have enjoyed Mr. Lucas’s last three films will not be disappointed with this latest trip to a galaxy far, far away. For the irritable minority still smarting from the unapologetic latter-day dumbing-down of the director’s original vision, “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” is, mercifully, relatively light on the embarrassing moments that marred the last three “Star Wars” features. It might even bode well for the Cartoon Network’s small-screen “Clone Wars” series, set to air in the fall.