Okay...here's the deal
I am only beginning to learn this animation thing. A 5-minute feature is about 9000 frames.
As I am writing this, I am currently rendering a 5 second 320x240 clip that has taken about 1 hour to render thus far. It's at frame 80 right now of 150. 3D animation is a heavy duty and expensive business, as I am finding out the hard way.
The major studios have what they call "render farms", several PC's connected together to form a render network that speeds up production. I'm getting ready to buy another PC.
Setting it up is not a problem. Rendering (loading textures, creating shadow maps, and light calculations) can take up to 3 minutes per frame. You could imagine how long it would take to create that 5 minute clip.