you can use bones and inverse kinematics.. its just that you need to make all your objects copy rotations of the bones instead of parenting them.
bake some keyframes
http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/2533/is-there-a-way-to-convert-a-constraint-to-a-keyframe
and badabing.. ik solved baked keyframes directly to the objects themselves
you can use bones and inverse kinematics.. its just that you need to make all your objects copy rotations of the bones instead of parenting them.
bake some keyframes
http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/2533/is-there-a-way-to-convert-a-constraint-to-a-keyframe
and badabing.. ik solved baked keyframes directly to the objects themselves