Animation load bug

My project is ready to be built, but when I open a scene that contains my character, the character animations don't work anymore. I have to copy and paste the character and then they work, but if i load the scene in game from another scene, the animations don't work. How can I fix this?

EDIT: Instantiating the player does the same thing except causes more weird bugs like the console saying there is no animator controller even though I'm watching it cycle through animations in the animator window. There is no reason this should be an issue. Animations just don't play unless I open the editor and copy and paste the player. This is a huge issue, seeing as I can't build my project because the animations wont work on load. (My project that needs to be completed by tomorrow). All the animations cycle through fine in the animator window, but when I first open a scene, they don't work. I have to copy and paste my character in the editor for them to work. I have found no known issue on this reported in the issue tracker, and can not report it as I'm not even sure how to recreate it. But this is killing all of my hard work. I have tried every work around I can think of and it just won't work. I've poured over 2000+ lines of code on just this issue alone, and the more I try to work around it, the more odd bugs appear. I've been having this experience since day 1. If anyone can recreate this, please add this to the issue tracker and let me know, and if you've had this issue yourself, don't remain silent. Please help. Thank you.