Answer by maxnorth

It took a while for this question to finally go up but I learned a lot in that time and solved my problem. The number one thing that was causing problems was the fact that if the rigidbodies are not set to isKinematic while an animator is controlling the character, then every single force that gets applied to those rigidbodies during all that time stacks until the animator is removed or disabled, at which point they are all applied simultaneously, which is why gravity slams down my character for just a moment and then acts normally. This occurred to me after I was shooting the character while it was animated, because the force of each bullet would apply when I deactivated the Animator. My current solution is to put a single animator on the top layer and use "foreach ( Rigidbody rb in GetComponentsInChildren&ltRigidbody&gt() ) rb.isKinematic = //false or true" at the same time that I set "GetComponent&ltAnimator&gt().isEnabled = //false or true", and this creates the exact effect I've been aiming for. Just for the sake of spelling things out, I'll also add that I realized why the tutorial in the video I posted above worked but wouldn't for me. They were using legacy animations and I was using humanoid. If an Animator controller intended for a humanoid avatar has any states with non-human type animations or no clip at all, then the player automatically goes into that static muscle configuration screen pose.