So great to see more work on pose research! My ultimate dream is to have a tool where I can give it a cartoon character and a set of pose photos, and have the tool pose the character in those poses. This feels one step closer to that.
One work that seems particularly pertinent to your use case is:
Gesture3D: Posing 3D Characters via Gesture Drawings http://www.cs.ubc.ca/labs/imager/tr/2016/Gesture3D/