Morph target animation not working when rendering movie

Hi, I’m fairly new to unreal engine. I’m using 5.2 and ima creating a simple cinematic render of a character talking which I want to render and then take into after effects to composite .

I have a simple character with morph targets creating face animation on ahead and a separate body with an animated skeleton.
The character and animation are in a level sequence because i am editing the body and face animation to suit my timings. It all works well.

When I play the sequence timeline the body face animate as desired. But when I render it using movie-render the body animates but the face does notate if the morph targets aren’t active.

I noticed that when I start my movie-render it also automatically starts the simulation.

I cancelled the render and then tried this- I activated the simulate-play button and then played the sequence timeline but this time the morph targets do not work. The body-skeleton animation is always fine.

So this makes me think I need to ask the software to allow morph-target-animation when simulating?

Any ideas? Many thanks