Is there anyway to style the actual Refinery backend? Ideally I'd like to make it look a bit nicer and even add some javascript animation to some of the buttons.
Refinery's erb pages and stylesheets are stored in the gem, not the root of your application.
In OSX, these files can be found at
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/bundler/gems/refinerycms-b4c324577513/core/app/views/refinery
and
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/bundler/gems/refinerycms-b4c324577513/core/app/views/assets/stylesheets
respectively. The gem number ('b4c324577513') will be different for everyone who installs the gem, so change the paths accordingly.