And did you know that you can make an animation in the preview mode if you
aren't too worried about quality.  Animations made in the preview mode take
about 1 to 5 minutes, depending on the number of frames.  Also a good way
of checking to see if the animation looks the way you want it to before
spending a lot of time on a rendered animation.
Even with a rendered animation you probably don't need the quality
you would with a still image, so try reducing your quality settings
and see if that speeds it up.
Also using low res figures and smaller texture maps might speed
up your frame renders.
But to sort of answer your question, I made a 1,000 frame animation
of Vicky dancing from a BVH and it took about 8 hours with the Firefly
renderer and it turned out beautiful.