Prioritizing Player Animations

I have a hunch that this answer will use "AnimationState.layer" in some way, shape, or form - and also part of my character controller - but this is something that has always tricked me up.

 > Let's say my player is doing an idle
 > animation.  He catches an object, and
 > depending on which hand catches it,
 > plays a different animation.  Once the
 > catch animation is finished, the
 > controller resumes back to the default
 > idle animation.

This would be relatively easy. When my player starts to catch a ball, start a coroutine that plays the correct catching animation, and then resumes the idle animation once it's finished.

 > But let's say an enemy attacks while
 > the player is catching a ball.  A
 > missile comes out of nowhere and blows
 > up on the player, sending him
 > backwards.  The correct animation now
 > would cancel the catching animation
 > (because he's being blown to
 > smithereens), and instead of idling,
 > the player needs to instead slowly get
 > back up into an injured position.

This all goes back to my character controller (and that during the catching code, I need to correctly accept and interpret the enemy attack), but in theory, what's the best way of doing this? I keep thinking that the character controller determines animations, and that animations should not determine how the character controller works