Bouncing character joints and scripted physics, need help getting this combination to work!

Hello all, I'm working on a game where I control a characters physics through a script I made rather than rigid body. The characters are 3d models with armatures and one of them has kitty ears that are not affected by animations. I was hoping to attach character joint components to the bones and start fine tuning to have them bob up and down, but that isn't quite working too well initially.

I added a rigidbody component to the parent that has the physics script I made attached. I then checked isKinematic so that it won't affect my script, as well as freezing everything other than x and y position (it's a 2.5d game). And effects are still lackluster. I changed my script to move the character with the MovePosition function instead of directly changing the transform, and I'm not even sure it had an effect.

Does anyone have some good advice for tackling this area?