Newness: One of my biggest problems with the movie was that we all knew that the majority of the characters were going to finish the movie pretty much as they started it, because we've all seen their futures in Revenge Of The Sith already. By introducing new characters whose fates we don't know, you bring in tension and hopefully the ability for stories that don't have to tread water when it comes to character development. The same goes for new aliens, new worlds - One of the great things about Star Wars when you were a kid was that it was full of cool new things, whether it was the Death Star, Jabba The Hutt, freezing Harrison Ford in carbonite or the creepy concept of incest. It'd be nice to get back to that with this new series. Except without the incest part.
Death: Alternatively, you could just introduce new characters to kill them off, as well. War is meant to Be Hell, people, so let's see the Clone Wars living up to that - There should be real cost to both sides for this to be worth the fact that characters were still talking about it during the original Star Wars trilogy.

Comedy: It's not that the Clone Wars movie doesn't try to be funny, just that it tries in the same way that the second trilogy tried... In other words, badly. One of the strengths of the original Star Wars movies were that they didn't take themselves too seriously (helped by having actors who didn't take it that seriously at all), and that kind of irreverence to the mythology is exactly what this new series needs.
Make The Jedis Cool Again: Yes, we all know that no-one really cares about that Midichloran thing from The Phantom Menace, but explaining away the Force was just one in a long line of steps that have taken away the mystery and magic of everyone's favorite lightsaber-wielding good guys since the original trilogy. Let's see some of that return in the new TV show... and if that fails, just put in lots of awesome lightsaber duels.

More Ziro The Hutt: Oh, you know you want that as well. He should do the opening of each episode, Rod Sterling-style: "Ah do declayah, those Jedahs are still fightin' those robots!" If ever a character has personified so many faults of a franchise (Unfunny, ill-cast and potentially offensive stereotype of a... gay slug... okay, maybe not that last one) and yet still somehow been as hilariously ridiculous as Ziro, I haven't seen them - but there's very little downside to seeing a lot more of this colorful citizen of Corsucant.

Whether or not you really enjoy The Clone Wars probably depends on how you approach it; if you're going in expecting the most awesomest animated movie ever made purely because it's Star Wars, then you're going to be disappointed (That's still Ratatouille). Similarly, if you're expecting something that's going to be just like the three prequel movies, you're not getting that, either - but that's a good thing. While Clone Wars shares both characters and a tendency for unfunny humor with Episodes 1 through 3, it's also less weighed down with its own mythology and faster moving than any Star Wars movie you've seen recently.

There's a lot to like about the movie, not least of which is the fact that the plot steers relatively clear of the main clone vs. droid war to something that is complete in and of the movie itself, and stars everyone's favorite Hutt (and his family, who you've already read about by now). It starts out incredibly strongly, with a newsreel-style intro that's reminiscent of the scrolls of the earlier films, but updated and appropriately over the top for this new series, giving you all the history you need to know in order to enjoy what you're about to see. Sadly, almost everything that follows, no matter how fun it ends up being, fails to live up to that opening.
It's not that anything about the movie is bad, as such, because it's completely enjoyable throughout. The problem is that it's "just" enjoyable, and you want it to be so much more, very much like the most recent Indiana Jones movie, with problems including that the animation only really comes to life in the battle sequences (partially because that's one of the few times that the characters move in a believable manner), the dialogue errs towards the familiar Lucas clunkiness where plot exposition always triumphs over character, and - most importantly - we're robbed of any real dramatic tension throughout the entire story, because we going in knowing that (almost) all of the main players will survive to appear in Revenge Of The Sith.

The one exception to that rule is Ahsoka, Anakin's new padawan learner, who may be the single most annoying new character that Lucasfilm has come up with since Jar-Jar. Ignore Ziro The Hutt (Actually, don't; he's hilarious in an over-the-top charicature way), Ahsoka will have your teeth on edge with her "plucky" nickname for Anakin and overly-familiar "I pretend to be cocky, but really I'm uncertain about my role" demeanor. With her modern (and modern cartoon-sidekick) demeanor, she seems out of place in the more mannered SW universe, and her presence keeps drawing you out of the story and back towards thoughts that someone, somewhere probably had the (bad) idea that they should try and make the movie more "hep" for "the kids" early in the development process.

But with all of that said, there's one thing that The Clone Wars manages to do very successfully, and that's make you believe that animation is the best vehicle for this kind of story. Even with the uneven character design (When the characters are very abstracted, like Obi-Wan or Count Dooku, they look wonderful, especially with the little touches like the brushwork color, but less-important characters get less attention, and seem to have wandered in from a Dreamworks movie at times) and uncertain movement, there is a coherence to the look of everything that no amount of CGI/live-action hybrid could touch. I came out of the theater feeling as if the movie had been good enough, if kind of slight, but definitely convinced that the TV series to follow - freed of the scale of a movie theater and able to follow all the interesting side-trips that the movie suggested - would be must-see TV. And maybe that's exactly what the movie was intended for, in the end.