UI Text Optimization? Updating Geometry seems to be slow

I'm taking a HUGE hit on Unity's UI performance, specifically when I'm displaying about ten textfields at once and filling in their text letter-by-letter (it's a big UI animation). Using the deep profiler I found that the biggest hit was from Text.OnFillVBO, which seems to fill in the vertices on a UI graphic (in this case, probably the text glyphs).

Does anyone know of a good way to optimize this? Ideally something that lets me still display animated text, it's a complex UI and just getting rid of some of the textboxes is NOT an ideal solution.

Thanks!