Nope. If animateItems is true, we assume animation for item changes, unless it's explicitly turned off. The only time we have any real control over options passed here is when we're resetting, since otherwise it's likely to be added from a new model creation in the collection, or when destroy() is called somewhere on the model (both of which are out of the caller's control, most of the time).

That explanation doesn't seem to match your conditional. You only animate the item if both options.animate isn't false and this.animateItems is true.
I might assign a local variable to the result of options && options.animate and then your conditional can check if (animate || this.animateItems)

The options.animate !== false is assuming animation for items, unless explicitly turned off (options.animate = false, which the reset handler passes, since that's the only place we have real control over when adding items here). That matches my explanation, from what I can tell.

The options.animate !== false says to animate if options.animate === true || options.animate === undefined.

OK, I understand now. I think it would be a lot clearer if you assigned a local variable called something like overrideAnimate, and then did if (this.animateItems && overrideAnimate !== false)

Okay. It's not actually overriding. It's just saying whether this particular item should be animated, if animation is turned on for this ListView. I'm not convinced a new variable really helps things any more than a comment would, but I'll pull it out and add a comment anyway.

Having played with this a bit, it feels fine to me. It's a very quick transition in the list. I tried shortening the animation time, and it actually ends up looking glitchy, rather than animated, if it's any shorter, like it's just stuttering when showing the text. Maybe it has something to do with being primarily text-based, or something.