what's wrong with having more than 1 minute per frame rendertime? just render it before you go to sleep! even if your animation is 200 frames, you can still afford to have 3-minute-per-frame render times or more, depending on if you work on it right when you wake up or not...

when i did my senior thesis for school my render times were anywhere from 2-10 minutes per frame, and the total animation was 4 minutes long or so at 30fps... at the same time, it was broken down into my pre-existing shot list so the whole thing didn't animate in one go...