feel like I need to add a few sentences here.
Practically the problem we have with the discussion here is, that we neither know the exact tone tourist wants to have for the animation, nor what he is trying to achieve.
A good animation is always just good in the context of the overall production. If something stands out too much it simply feels weird.
I agree with Tourist, it looks bland and mocap is not a good way to go, UNLESS you know how to act well. Exaggerate your mocap movements. Theater actors know that to have the audience see something interesting from that far away, they have to really push movement.
Yeah one needs to be careful where he gets his mocap references from.
But what's always right in a mocap reference is the relative movement of the arcs - you can easily find out when each part has which position which makes it a great learning source, even if the model don't acted that great.
In real sports which also has a big a big audience, none of the athletes is exaggerating any movement and nonetheless if you know what you look for, you can easily tell what they are exactly doing. Those are mostly efficient and very elegant movements, because they are on spot and also a great learning source of how the human body moves.
The factor of exaggeration however always depends what one wants to make - the tone of the project
For an exact simulation of a movement, exaggeration won't work that good.
While for most games and films it's a great possibility, but it always has to be in line with the style.
A lighthearted Disney movie can get away with broken lings and over the top animations (just look at Goofie's walks) while a more serious production has overall less exaggeration.
We could go and compare goofy with the prince of Snow White here - both are great, but both have a very different tone to them.
I would say as rule of thumb: the more earnest the tone you want to have, the more realistic you have to be and therefore you need less exaggeration.
A regular walk, mocapped and then transformed to animation is going to look bland, but if you do a completely over the top walk, it'll look just right.
I think for pixel art as a medium mocap isn't really that effective to go from, since a big part of any pixel art is stylization, even for big resolutions you have to stylize a lot.
We would need to work in an insane big resolution (which is unfitting for pixel art) to be able to capture all the small details in a readable way, so it goes anyways against what pixelart is effective for.
Nonetheless we can get all hose small details working and good looking if we stylize and
exaggerate them in the right way (right way depends on the tone).
If we look at all the stylized NES and SNES games I would say that strong exaggeration is the way to go for any pixel art game. The lower the res, the more exaggeration you will have anyways, because the distance a single pixel travels relative to the char size increases.
some side-notes:
For 3D animation it's also worthwhile to look up examples like Polar Express or Beowulf, which were made by using motion capturing, but both films touch the uncanny valley. Nonetheless
Both films are great examples of what you want to avoid.
What was also really interesting for me was to look at the graphics of the 3D zelda series. They went from "realistic low poly" (N64 Zeldas) to hyper stylized and exaggerated (Wind Waker) back to a more realistic style (Twilight princess) to a mixture of both previous artstyles (Skyward Sword)
In terms of
aestethics or by the question "what artstyle might be the most fitting one for my game", Zelda is definitely one of the best subjects to study out there, because they had a lot of very diverse, but interesting artstyles.
The interesting experience I had with those games is that I really disliked WindWaker's artstyle as it came out, but by now it feels to me like it has the most "timeless" graphics of all games released so far, while others in comparison have aged badly.