Just another reply to agree with everyone. 😀
Even when just rigging and animating you are going to have to understand the basics of how the model you are working with was constructed. An example of this would be if you were attempting to rig and animate a model that had really bad topology. You might end up feeling like an absolute failure because nothing seems to working right or looking good when it’s not your fault at all!
Being able to look at the model in an informed way to determine if it will support the type of animations you eventually want it to do is important. If your “toolkit” also includes some basic mesh editing skills that makes you even more powerful in that regard because you can make changes to the model to improve its performance.
So imo, something like the CORE modeling course would be useful in the long run. If you are very new to Blender I’d suggest going with the Blender Basics overview series and then the CORE modeling course, moving into rigging and animating.
Have fun!
