What's important, the bones or the animations?

I’m a newbie in this regard… and I’m not real clear on this, but what’s important, the bones that make up a model, or the animations built in the modelling software. Do I simply tell jme to animate my model with the ‘walk’ animation, or do I have to tell jme which joints to rotate? I’m pretty sure I can tell jme which joints to rotate but not sure if I can go the other route of just telling it to walk, run, etc.

As I understand it the bones are what matters, as far as being able to blend multiple animations (which currently jme doesn’t seem to do). I think the joint controller can be used to build animations by rotating bones (I haven’t tested this theory yet cause my test model is acting weird).