I agree with that, a few kids on our team had played around with max, but no one had ever tried doing something this large. I attended a FIRST 3ds max clinic, but it was extremely basic stuff. As far as web training,
www.3dbuzz.com had some great tutorials, I think they have 4 cd's of max training (with like 3-4 hours of video per cd). I hope that can help someone out. I definately agree with you about the difficulty of finding a good mentor for 3d animation though.