Animator SetTrigger inexplicably not firing

So I have an animation that raises and lowers the landing gear on a spaceship. The animations are correctly imported and tied to the animator. When I set the animation to trigger on entry (for testing purposes), it fires no problem.

However, when I try to trigger the animation on keypress, the method is called, but the animator doesn't respond.

I know the correct animator is attached, because I can see the parameters in my debug inspector:

The transitions are also set properly, see below:

And finally, I know 'SetTrigger' is being called, because it's hitting the breakpoint on the function call.

I've tried setting boolean parameters as well, to trigger the transition, but those won't work either. Nor will putting the animations in separate layers and calling those directly.

What am I missing?

Update: I managed to get the state machine (animator window), working as intended. However, the animations won't play.

If the animations are triggered by the system, they'll play just fine. However if they're triggered by keypress, the animated bar in the animator window will play on the item, but the animation itself won't play! I'm wondering if this is just a unity bug at this point, but it's a pretty nasty one.