The circles are just bones pretending to be circles. You can make any bone any other shape pretty easily in Blender. I’m way too time poor these days to do a tutorial and also too time poor to continue with Ron&Obi. Gimmie a minute and I’ll post a file for you all to play with and see my workflow.
Cheers and thanks,
Glenn
Here is RON, free for free!
http://www.glennmelenhorst.com/misc/blender/ron.blend
Just grab his circles and drag them about. It’s all simple FK / IK and some bits are better rotated than moved. You’ll get the hang of it.
Good luck!
Glenn
This is amazing! I loved the trailer. If you were to put a kickstarter together, I would donate.
I thought about doing 2d planes like this, but it never occurred to me to actually deform the mesh. The animation has a lot of polish!
Awesome - and thanks for posting the file. I’ll mess around with it. I just rigged my character - took all morning to add a mouth and eyes as nurb circles with hooks. Augh.
Wow thank you very much for sharing the file, i wil use it as reference when creating my own 2d character, thanks again very much 
thanks for the file, i really want to dive into 2d in blender, but it needs a lot of experimenting to get a good workflow, i hope you file helps.
Let me know if you work it out
It should be pretty simple.
G
i will post here any results, thank you.
blender is 3D so why do you limit it to 2D instead of doing it in 3D with shadows light play around ect…
would look even better I think!
if you wan to make a character to rotate it makes it more difficult in 2D then 3D for instance!
happy cl
Meh, 3D is overrated. Blender’s a great program for 2D. It gives you a 3D environment to place your 2D characters in and set up easy multiplane cameras and environments.
The diffuculty of working in 2D is part of the charm for me.
Also, I was a 2D cel animator years ago and have spent over 25 years working in 3D (www.iloura.com.au) so the last thing I want to do when I get spare time is more 3D 
Glenn
Very cool stuff. I’ll have to give this 2D process a try. I’ve messed around with a little bit of 2D in Blender before (just for kicks), but I don’t think I was nearly as efficient at doing things. Thanks for sharing, much appreciated.
I’ve only ever brain sprinkled (very small brain storms) about 2D in Blender because I assume it all to be so daunting. My gf and I were just discussing the strengths of 2D and 3D; she’ll LOVE seeing this and I’m writing to say thank you very much for the ron.blend!!! You make this look so natural and effortless. Incredibly fun thread and it’s always a delight seeing someone so able use Blender.
I have the problem of lots of voices and ideas and few 3D skills to put them in to! I perform every evening for my gf’s daughter though. Best of luck with what you’re working on here.
edit: In the model you gave, how does one complete the IK requirements for Ron’s right elbow and wrist?
Can you be a little more specific?
I NEED HELP!
Does anyone out there know how I might be able to swap out one piece of mesh for another during animation? I’d really like to be able to call different mouth shapes out by animating the mesh datablock but that doesn’t seem to be able to be animated.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Glenn
you can do this with the outliner visibility I think
Another way I’ve used, for replacing mouth textures, rather than mouth objects, is the UV warp modifier. Pretty powerful too, but for your rigs it looks like replacing meshes would be better. But let me know if you want to look at one of these rigs too.
Cheers.
Beautiful. I’m reading ‘Noble Approach’ at the moment. So inspirational.
This is brilliant 
I’ve always been a fan of his work. Thanks for your posts. I’ll try to set up some drivers and see how I go. The most important thing for a fluid workflow would be to not have to hunt about for the correct shape, having a visual library would be best but I’m not sure that would be so easy to set up in blender.
Oddly, a max cutout animation plugin became available today that does just that. A random coincidence given I haven’t looked at my characters for such a long time
Glenn
Nice one Hammers.
Looks like a good way to do it. A bit of setup but copy/pasting the curves speeds things up a lot. I have Ron’s mouth driven by an empty and it works nicely. This would be a great script for someone to python up so that the driver setup was more user friendly.
Glenn