In animation, style can be considered as a distinctive layer over the content of a motion, allowing a character to achieve the same gesture in various ways. Editing existing animation to modify the style while keeping the same content is an interesting task, which can facilitate the re-use of animation data and cut down on production time. Existing animation edition methods either work directly on the motion data, providing precise but tedious tools, or manipulate semantic style categories, taking control away from the user. As a middle ground, we propose a new character motion edition paradigm allowing higher-level manipulations without sacrificing controllability. We describe the concept of pose metrics, objective value functions which can be used to edit animation, leaving the style interpretation up to the user. We then propose an edition pipeline to edit animation data using pose metrics.