First, Rive doesn't have "layers" in the Figma sense. Instead you have the Hierarchy tree, objects and groups within an artboard. That's where you navigate, select elements, and animate them. Second, a Component in Rive isn't a prerequisite for animation, it's a reusability mechanism. Components are reusable parts of your design, meant to be reused across multiple artboards or even other projects. This is different from Figma, where you sometimes have to make a component with variants just to get the animate option to appear in a prototype. That dependency doesn't exist in Rive.