In my opinion, smooth, expressive animation will always trump mouth animation in terms of expressing what a character is saying, along with giving off a sense of personality.

While I don't inherently have anything against mouth animation - I've seen it done very well in films like Zombie: Genesis - I do think many people use it as an excuse to not animate their characters as much, often having them be in relatively static poses while their mouths run off. This, really, just gets visually boring quite quickly.

While you're at least not falling into the trap that I mentioned above, I do think you need to put more focus on improving your character animation rather than refining your mouth animation. You can find lots of tutorials on this across the internet (both related specifically to LEGO and to general animation), but I think, at the moment, your animation isn't refined enough to significantly gain from mouth animation.

Don't take this as discouragement for doing what you're doing. When animation is good enough, well done mouth animation can add a bit of a professional touch to the work. I just think you need to focus more on the basics of animation before extending your reach too far.

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Thanks for understanding. I am thinking about downloading Adobe After Affects, I hear it's good for animating mouths. If any of you work or have worked with that, please tell me what you think of it. I do think as well that if my mouth movements have been so bad, I don't think I would have the number of subscribers and followers in general, that I do have. And if I suddenly stopped doing it, they might be quite surprised, and not in a good way, for they all expect me to animate the mouths. I have seen plenty of excellent work without any mouth movements and most of the best brickfilmers don't do it, but for those who are familiar with my films, they will be expecting to see it.

On the subject of replacement animation, there are a lot of places online now offering a professional minifig printing service. Has anyone tried having a set of five or six heads made with the basic phoneme shapes and animating lip synch the old school way?

Donald Faison's Black Stormtrooper also uses this technique.

Anything done in post will be longer and harder, the cost of printing heads has stopped me from really looking into that route, not to mention the more limited options when it comes to choosing faces.

William Osborne, if you want to make a film with 20 minifigs, good luck, most characters in most films don't even need to talk, I would be more worried about the logistics of 20 speaking characters then anything else, 4 characters with 10 expressions each would be more realistic, although only 10 expressions would be pretty limiting, the nice thing about digital faces, at least mine, is there are hundreds of 'heads' each, just the fact that you can blink during any mouth movement is huge.

^I feel like that would be the most effective way of animating mouths. It's easy to erase a minifig's expression with nail polish remover (as demonstrated in the LEGO Movie) and then you could draw different mouths for each syllable or way of pronunciation.

Also, when watching Frozen, I did feel that the mouths were becoming a bit pixelated.

Don't use nail polish or any other chemicals! It will ruin your plastic. Trust me, I know. Use a rubber eraser instead. Just give it a little elbow grease and it will come off extremely cleanly. I have done this to a lot of LEGO printings, faces, LEGO Friends, etc...

I did it with this LEGO Friends mouth (and torso) so I could experiment with custom decals, and it seemed to work quite well:

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"Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God." - 1 Corinthians 10:31b

I'm not sure if I like the look of the mouths in the Magic Portal. Of course it works brilliantly for a film from 1989, before after affects or anything of the like, but I don't think I fancy doing it myself.

It looks like there is a site offering this service specifically geared towards animation:
http://minifigs.me/shop/phonetic-heads-for-animation/