I worked on the Garfield movies - live action with CG cats - and frames with Garfield in it required between 600-900 render hours. This is due to the physically based animation support for internal body motions and similar physics for all the fur. I've still got the render stats, because I was the render farm wrangler for those jobs...
Pre-render steps (building the BVH/KDTree, caching transformed geometry, caching textures and building mipmaps) can take 2 hours before the rendering even starts :)
And this is on a machine with 32 i7 cores and 96 GB of RAM.
There's a reason SPI and Weta (and the other CG/VFX companies, although those two have the biggest) have huge renderfarms...
