Bug Cannot animate

Windows 10
Unity 2021.3.23f1

Hi all, i'm new to both game development and Unity.

I'm building a first project to get the hang of the tools and am having a lot of trouble animatiing my player.

This is the way i go about it, from info both in other threads here and youtube tutorials:
1- Open animation window
2- Select object to animate
3- Create animation file (from button in animation window)
4- drag sprites for animation into animation window
5- play animation
After that on can play with the editor to adjust the animation further

Thing is when i hit play it doesn't really do anything, not on the scene view and not on the preview window (and, of course, it also doesn't play in game mode after referrencing the animation file to the player object), but the bar still shows it cycling through the animation, so when i hit play i know it's playing, it just doesn't reflect anywhere.

I've tried opening different projects, and tried with "Pixel Adventure 1" and "Prototype Hero Demo - Pixel Art" from the asset store, still no animation

I don't know what else to do or try at this point so any insight you may provide would be trutly appreciated.
-----
EDIT: inb4: i also make sure the animation has Legacy checked, but that one gives out a warning, so it's kind of a no brainer, either way, result is the same both with or without Legacy checked
-----

 

Ok, i'm big dumb.
Apparently it won't handle animations from the Animation component alone, instead i need an Animator component to handle the animations and apparently i don't really need an animation component, at least for preview.