How to animate a child element?

Question

Unity

How to make an animation of a child element? The bottom line is that I have a lot of child elements and hanging animation on them is not an option. I would like to have animation in the project and through the code at startup we find a random element and hang the animation

using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using UnityEngine;

public class ScrpChl : MonoBehaviour
{
    
    int max;
    public GameObject parent;
    public Animation anim;
    public AnimationClip a;

    void Start()
    {
        anim = GetComponent<Animation>();
        Debug.Log(transform.childCount);
        parent.transform.GetChild(Random.Range(0, transform.childCount + 1)).gameObject.anim.Play(a.name); // не понимаю как правильно записать gameObject.anim.Play(a.name);
    }
   
}

Answer 1

I did not modify the code qualitatively in any way, only logically:

void Start()
    {
        anim = transform.GetChild(Random.Range(0, transform.childCount)).gameObject.GetComponent<Animation>(); //Изменил диапазон рандома
        Debug.Log(transform.childCount);
       anim.Play(a.name);
    }

First you need to select a random element with an animator, get an animator from this element and only then
start the animation (in the question code it is not clear what is happening - the GameObject'a takes a field that is not originally in Unity.).
PS Such code is dangerous, because there are a lot of moments where it can easily catch nullreference
PSS This script is hung up on the parent. The parent selects the element on which to run the animation.