I tried it, but there's one problem. All the meshes are now being affected by position and rotation changes to the original, and I only want to affect their shapes. I'll try to explain it a little better...

I have 30 walking frames. Each is a made up of several meshes, arm, forearm, etc., for easier positioning. All the characters in my game use the same walking style, so rather than redo every animation frame for every character, I want to just change the shape of the original, and have all the instanced walking frames be updated. I can't have the positions and rotations change though, because then they all become the same walking frame.

How can I lock position and rotation changes to the instanced meshes and just have them be affected by shape changes?