With our earlier discussion of how to address the illustration situation for the project, i thought drawing cartoonish bears maybe a good start. 

As you can see the process of maintaining the prominent features of the bear makes it recognizable(head, arms, body, etc). 

From that, i have also produced a cut-out illustration of the bear, my focus for this development was to have as much mobility in the character, so that animation can be done as quickly as possible.  

i created sum cartoon backgrounds which might work? youll have to excuse my man hes a bit rubbish!

initial ideas

developing background (woods) and character (animal) style using cut-out colored paper.
[i'm not happy with the outcome though]

developing character style using collage cut-outs for bodies and cartoonish illustrations for faces.

illustration based on the cut out characters idea

Took me a while, but i got there in the end?!?

Here's a few illustration sites that we could possibly look into:

Tobyleigh.com

ellywalton-illustrations.com

rui-ricardo.com

Two of the illustrators have a nice messy look to it, something that we can venture into?

oh and also here's a nice lil website that has option/choice aspect of interaction!

Killfrog.com

The site also has a "How to animate" section on it too, so hopefully that will be helpful, if we need tips on that kinda thing.