My opinion is that in 2D fighing games. An idle pose should totally express the character's attitude.
Defensiveness, readiness, arrogance, anger, calm and wit can all be conveyed by how the character body parts are configured.
Is it's back up straight? chest forward? confidence. Ar the hands up or down? hand down would seen to radiate inner calmth or overconfidence.
There are many variations.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtuWNdwZC_s

Look at Blanka and how much he is bent forward. With his arms alomst dragging on the ground. It gives him some sort of animalistic appearance. He fights out of anger and confusion. Much like some animals. Whereas Ryu has a more optimal fighting pose. His arms and legs configured to yield the most effecient balance between attacking and defending. There is no unnecessary moving. and no limb really sticks out. He is the balanced warrior.

Zangief does not even bother to cover himself. His arms and hands are wide open. Why? Because he wants to grab people! You can just see that this guy gets his pleasure from dominating the opponent with grabs and throws. This is why he leans forward so much! He can't wait!

Chun-Li's hand are not clutched at all. Her fingertips are softly stretched and the arms move i an soft wave like motion. She is calm. Her power comes from inner Peace. Se knows there is no point in balded fists and instead put her strongest asset forward. Her legs.

So what is your character's attitude?

I point this out because i think your character already has a very strong attitude.
Right now looks sort of wacky like PixelDriver mentioned. I agree this is a good thing. 
Think about who this guy is.

I posted an update on my site.
http://grundysoft.com/
The pixelart is all wip. I know it's blunt.
I use really raw stuff to check if the animations/proportions look ok in-game and revise them if they need to.
If the overall look is ok then i turn to shading/details etc

But if you are into character design it might be fun looking into.
Also check if you like shooting at toys.

You should ask the guys who made Truckers Delight. They seem to know how to make a video with pixelart animation.

I want to make a pixelart trailer for my upcoming game myself but i cannot share any usefull information other than that im a right now doing tests by making seperate frames/graphics in fotoshop and then composing/layering them in Flash. I find this combination suboptimal. So i'll be sure to follow this topic as well from now on. I might learn something!

I cannot speak for you. And i dont know how much exposure this game will get.
But when i showed my games to other people during my education i learned that there are some things in games that just about every player notices and points out to you. Like characters resembling sperm. If you do not change this there is a chance you will hear they look like sperm a lot of times. Which can be a bummer during presentations and pitches.

Pardon my terrible pixelart skills but i took the liberty of trying out some shapes for spirits.
They are not all that good and the addition of arms may take away from their simplicity but you may consider it a start for your own redesign.
or just take one of these, after all they're just shapes.




I'd say: Keep up the good work!
This whole game is starting to look really cool and i am very interested in playing it!
I still dont understand why a difficulty curve should be visualised by a gradually changing surrounding though. Are tougher levels further down the river maybe?

I choose programs depending on how i want to animate. that is frame to frame or tweening animations.
For creating vector images i'd use Illustrator. I've been avoiding it for long but i got my head around it last year and it cooperates pretty well with flash.
It's easy to assemble stick figures with limbs and create walk cycles with motion tweens in Flash.
But flash does not handle the rotation of bitmaps very well and i find it to be less pleasant when making frame to frame animations.