Getting Started
1979 · 12m · Canada
Directed by Richard Condie
A procrastinating man tries to practise piano but keeps finding distractions. When he finally sits down to play, pandemonium erupts in Richard Condie's animated short.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A guy can't play piano because life keeps interrupting—sounds like a greeting card until Condie turns it into controlled visual chaos that somehow makes procrastination look like the only sane response to existence.
Condie's mastery of animated escalation sits squarely in the NFB tradition of formal comedy, where each distraction is choreographed with the precision of a Tati sequence, building toward pandemonium that feels architecturally inevitable.
The genius move here is treating the piano bench as contested territory—every time he settles, the animation language shifts register, and that tonal whiplash between stillness and bedlam does more work than any dialogue ever could.