If we remove the somewhat arbitrary qualifier of “large animated landscapes”, there are endless numbers of photorealistic Cycles renders:
With these examples, I continue to maintain that the “Cycles look” is a myth and it’s perfectly possible to make photoreal renders in Cycles. There don’t seem to be many examples of large animated landscapes, but these examples (and many others) show that it has nothing to do with Cycles and has entirely to do with what people are making with it.
Cycles may not a good tool for large animated landscapes, but it’s absolutely capable of perfectly convincing photo realism