If it's any consolation I can work out from the gif what you probably did, though were I to try I would probably blunder along with something different, accidentally stumble onto the same thing or have to ask if I wanted to do exactly what you did XD
You got a lot further than I did playing with the toon shaders, this was about as far as I got playing with freestyle:
Think you've done a pretty good job with the retro look :) kind of curious as to how well it would animate, definitely makes for some lovely stills. I love its little facial expressions XD
That definitely looks 2D, Ry! I forgot to try freestyle on him, not sure if it'll look better, though, because it'll break the seamless colour of the shade with the background. Toon shading is pretty simple, but that's the problem, you don't know what to do with a simple setup XD
And since it's not organic (he's a robot), the weight painting for animation is simpler than an organic character. But I don't know if I want to try animation soon...
If you wanted to try freestyle maybe do it in another version. Or maybe on a different project altogether, you have a good thing going here XD
If it's a low poly model with a simple rig you should be able to churn out simple animations on your dinosaur computer. It's rendering I'd be more worried about but at least if you're rendering to frames like you should be you can resume if it crashes on you :S