Error says I have no animator attached to my game object, but i do?

Bear in mind that I started using unity and c# just about 6 hours ago, so I have no idea what I’m doing.

I’m trying to add animations to a simple movement script that I made, but I’m having some trouble. I’ve already made 4 animations and started to set up a blend tree based on a tutorial that I’m watching on youtube, but when I go to play it, it will not let me and gives the error “MissingComponentException: There is no ‘Animator’ attached to the “cat1” game object, but a script is trying to access it.
You probably need to add a Animator to the game object “cat1”. Or your script needs to check if the component is attached before using it.”

I’ve checked and double checked that I do indeed have an animator on the cat1 game object. I don’t know this language or program well at all, and I have no idea what to do other than look it up (which has yielded no results) and ask here.

if anyone could help me out here, I’d be grateful

Where does the MissingComponentException came from? you should be able to inspect the stack trace in your cosole window log.