Legacy animations, not playing

Hi,

I am using legacy animations in my 2d Platformer, primarily because unity keeps telling me I must mark them as such. My player animations will not play in the inspector window. Each sprite is shown in the animation, but they will not play. And they will not play after being hooked up to code.

Before I go into the code or change them to legacy they SEEM to work fine.

The code I am using for my idle animation for example is:

 if(_controller.Velocity.x <= 0){
 _controller.animation.Play("Idle");}

There are no errors or anything wrong in the code as far as I know, seems like it should be pretty simple to get those animations to play, but they will not. Like I said, they play fine in the inspector until I change them to legacy and then they are pretty worthless.

I am removing the animator component from the player and from other objects I have animated because I don't want to mess with that if I don't have to and that works fine on objects, but not my player apparently.