Facial animation: Textures?

So I’m trying to get a Windwaker-like facial rig set up, but I’m at a loss of how to do this in an organized way. Do I slap on a texture on the head and animate it, or copy the face to a separate object and make transparent png sequences for the facial animation? Do I do eyebrows seperately and make them part of the facial rig? what if I did everything with solid shapes and swapped them out? For the mouth, do I actually need the geometry there, or can I normal map that(but then what if the mouth gets bigger? Does that mean I have to animate the normal map as well?