Even if you say this is Pixar style head, you should have strong anatomy knowledge behind it, the Pixar heads may have highly stylized forms and proportions, but are still rooted in human anatomy. Edgeloops exist to mimic a structure in 3d, in this case the human head, so what kind of mechanism deforms the human…
Regarding poles in general, I believe you're going to have poles, somewhere, any time the direction of the topo flow changes/splits. The goal is then only to have them when you actually need to; to move them to areas that aren't going to deform much; and to have them distributed in such a way that problems with poles don't…