I've been watching a lot of animated films lately. First to decide on the style I want and second to set my expectations. This is going to be a long haul project. Hopefully, the quality will improve over time, especially if other artists participate. But as it stands at the moment, I'll be generating my characters using Makehuman, Mixamo or ManuelBastioniLAB. Initially, I wanted to use cartoon characters similar to Disney films like Tangled or Inside Out. However, the only character generator for this is CG-Cookie's Flex Rig. I like the characters it produces, but the clothing is not great. I can go down the road of modeling clothes for the characters, but as I continued writing the story, the cartoon character look didn't seem to fit in how the story is turning out.
It appears I'm setting on a mix between cartoon and realistic looking characters. These can be produced with the character generation packages I mentioned previously, and still fit within the story. I'll probably need to rig them myself using Blender's Riggify.
My hope then is to have quality somewhere in the ballpark as video games:
These are still pretty high quality, so we'll see how it goes. Animation plays a big part on how real something looks. Some of the things I'll defer for later in the project are things like clothing/hair simulation. I'll start by using mesh clothing, then as I get better and faster I'll add clothing and hair simulation.
Of course all this is up for change. I'm still at the very beginning.