Animation with animated children not accepted by Animator

I am really confused about what is happening here. So, I have a simple model, and I created a walking animation for it (It is a four-legged thing, the legs just go in circles). The animation is moving the legs, which are children of the object. This works just fine, including when in play mode, but I want to have it change speed, direction, etc. based on variables.

Simple solution: Use an animator controller

Problem: If I try to use the animation in an animator controller, the state will simple show the Motion as: "Motion (None)".If I drag the animation asset to the box in the inspector, it appears that the state will accept it, but then nothing happens. As well, if I simply drag and drop the animation into the animator workspace, a new state bearing the name of the animation is created, but the motion is still empty. I though that maybe for some reason it would only accept it if the main object was moving, so I added a tiny wiggle ( a y increase of 0.00001 in the middle), but that accomplished nothing.