There’s no reason to feel like an idiot.
CGI and animation are topics that people spend their entire lives learning and perfecting. Trying to animate a birthday card might very well had thrown you into the deep end too early in the process. It takes time to learn this stuff.
But if you want to feel consistent progress, you must learn the fundamentals like the back of your hand. Everything else builds on them. This goes for animation, modeling, rendering, anything really.
