How to disable animations for a view and all it's subviews temporarily?

You can use next static method in UIView:

+ (void)setAnimationsEnabled:(BOOL)enabled

See reference for detail info

As said by Victor, you can use the static method + (void)setAnimationsEnabled:(BOOL)enabled of UIView to disable animations. However, this will disable animations for all views after you call that method. You should remember to enable animations later. As of disabling animations for a specific hierarchy of views but no others, that is not possible.