Having trouble trying to send a signal to a instanced node's children

Question

Godot 4.3

I want my main scene to continously generate many instances of one node. Since I'm instancing the node via code, I'm having trouble accessing it's children to send it a signal.

I'm generating customers in a store and need to access their animationplayer while they move around.

In the relevant code in the store script:

@onready var CustomerNode = load("nodepath") 
@onready var Customer = CustomerNode.instantiate()  

var starting position 
var ending position 
var customeranimation  

signal AnimationStart(customeranimation 

signal AnimationStop()  

func CustomerSpawn():       
    add_child(Customer)     
    if randi() % 2 ==0:         
        WalkPastStore()     
    else:         
        GoInStore()   

## ^^ a customer will spawn and then randomly decide rather to go in the store or past the store  

func WalkPastStore():
     var tween = get_tree().create_tween()
     if randi() % 2 ==0: #right to left
         starting position = some_vector2_coordinates
         ending position = some_vector2_coordinates
          customeranimation = str("WalkLeft")
     else: #left to right
         starting position = some_vector2_coordinates
         ending position = some_vector2_coordinates
          customeranimation = str("WalkRight")
     Customer.position = startingposition         AnimationStart.emit(customeranimation)         tween.tween_property(Customer, "position", endingposition, 1)  

## ^^ when the customer spawns, it will be randomly assigned a start point, an end point, and a string name for an animation that matches  the direction it'll go in. Then the AnimationStart signal will emit and send the animation string name to the instanced node's child -- an AnimationPlayer. A tween will also drag the Customer to it's positions.       

func GoInStore():
    pass
    #the same thing but AnimationStop is used once inside the store          

And the relevent code in the animation player script looks like this:

func _on_animation_start(customeranimation):
     play(customeranimation)
     print("the animation is ", customeranimation)

func _on_animation_stop():      
    stop()
    print("the animation stopped")

There are no errors, the signals do go through as the print() test works, but the instanced node still isn't animating.

__

In order to send the signals, I needed to have a Customer already instanced into the scene visually. When I made that Customer visible during runtime, I noticed that its animation played even though the one instanced through code doesn't have its animation running. It just stands like a statue while it slides into its position.

I think this might be because the Customer that is instanced through code counts as a completely separate node from the Customer I'm sending the signals to. I'm hoping to find a way to send a signal to a manually instanced node's children.

I tried this

@onready var anisprite = Customer.get_node("Customer/AnimationPlayer")

func testfunc():
    print(anisprite)

Nothing changed and my output printed "<Objectnull>" so I'm not quite sure how to send a signal this way.