It’s great to learn music as a child – except when it’s no fun at all

There’s a romanticised view that learning music as a child is a profoundly enriching experience, that it’s a portal into a world of creativity and a means of achieving a host of secondary cognitive benefits. While learning an instrument is all of that and more for some people, music lessons can also be the locus of a very particular set of traumas, from the indignity of being forced to practise the piano with teacups on your hands to the paralysing performance anxiety that might surge forth at a dreaded recital. Composed of the true stories of unhappy music students rendered in varied animated styles, and shot through with an undercurrent of dark humour, this short from the Serbian filmmaker Miloš Tomić plumbs the depths of music education – including the gargantuan gap between fantasising about greatness and actually achieving it.