Pixel Art & Animatic

I've begun creating the pixel sprites for the animation, and reading about <a href="http://www.squidoo.com/how-to-make-8-bit-music">chiptune (8-bit) music</a>.  I'm not terribly musically inclined, so I'm not sure if I'm going to make music for the film or just use sound effects.  Either way I would like to create some custom audio.

For the pixel art I'm focusing on getting the major character sprites and basic outlines for the backgrounds.  I'm not sure at this point if any of the scenes are going to fully animate.  Although I've created pixel art before, I don't have a lot of experience with pixel animations.  Creating the actual animations could easily become very time consuming.  For most of the scenes limited animation will be appropriate, however the fireplace scene and a few others would be more interesting with full animation.  I have put together a preliminary animatic; currently it has no sound.

I've been debating how to deal with moving sprites around the scene.  AfterEffects does sliding animation well, however the sprites move in smaller increments than the enlarged pixels.  This results in an inconsistency in the pixel art style.  This inconsistency doesn't necessarily bother me, however an appropriated balance will need to be struck between the limitations of traditional pixel art and the freedoms of modern high resolution imagery.  Superbrothers Sword & Sworcery EP strikes a similar balance by combining pixel art with smooth gradients.