One minute per frame, is that all? I've done animations that take 20-to-30 minutes per frame or more, and PIXAR-quality frame renders can consume hours of render time. That's why they have such huge "farms" of rendering machines. In fact, there were times when I was using three PCs to render sections of an animation. It still took an agonizingly long time, but atleast far less than it would have with only one.
There are tricks you can use --- like not renedering shadows, and/or dropping anti-aliasing --- depending on the quality you're after. For instance, if you're just interested in checking the animation "flow," you can eliminate them both from the renders, and simply render a few spot-check "beauty shots" to make sure of your lighting.
Also, don't forget that you should be rendering out individual frames as JPEGs. That way, you can re-do sections or individual frames after making adjustments that don't affect the rest of the animation.
