Until I get a chance to open the engine and show you what I mean with screenshots, please read this article on the UE4 official docs: Creating and Displaying UI
You don’t need to reproduce every detail shown in that article for your project, but you should make sure you completely understand all of it.
The variable you need in your Player Controller blueprint is the one you promote out of the right side of the Create Widget node. This is demonstrated by Step 10 in the linked article.
Once you have your variable, accessing its animations should be a breeze.