Nice. One suggestion: If you want to add potential for the characters manipulating objects better, you might want to add bones to each hand for fingers, so the "mittens" can open and close around things, depending on exactly what animations you add.
Looks like you've gotten much farther than I have, glad you got it to work, although I admit I'm not in a position to judge much as I'm not the boss but one of the little guys here...
BTW, when the models have armatures set up and everything, you may want to (if you have time down the road) look into the ideas proposed for an intro animation ROQ video, as a number of ideas started but fizzled out, and I remember Winter had started a script some time ago, so you may want to check with him when you get to that point.
As far as the cinematic cut-scenes go, I still have the tools and such to make ROQ videos out of other video formats (AVI, MPEG, Whatever, including formats made by Blender rendered animations) so I can help with that when the time comes, if you're up to that in the future.