I hit quick save every 5 minutes, tops, and then hard saves once every 30-45 minutes, just to be on the safe side. Never hurts to have more saves, especially for EA when there's a ton of bugs and issues to fix.
As for the animations, that's weird... I've been able to skip them fine using ESC. It may be a bug, but check your key bindings and make sure you have the Skip Cutscene button mapped.
