Selective color correction with adjustment layers?

Hi!

I'm working on a cartoon in after effects, the same "puppets" are used throughout different scenes. The artist who rendered the background images used different color palettes to differentiate day and night. Because of this, the puppets need to be color corrected to match. The puppets are made up of many different layers (individual layers for arms, legs, props, etc.) so applying my color correction effects to all the layers would be an organizational nightmare and more time consuming.

Is there a way to color correct the puppets without affecting the background?

What I've been doing is using adjustment layers to affect all the layers, hiding the background, exporting the scene with an alpha channel, and then bringing the export back into the scene on top of the the background. (Then Re-Exporting to get my final image....) There's got to be a better way, right?