two animations interacting smoothly

hi guys,

so in my game, if the player stands behind an enemy AI and hits the attack key, the player and the enemy both play an animation simultaneously to make it look like the player is actually interacting with the enemy AI.

The way i did this was by putting my player and enemy models into my modelling program and placing the enemy model exactly 1 unit away from the player model.

I then animated both of them as just one animation.

then before importing to unity i separated the models (and their animation) in to different files and zeroed out their transforms. (so that they are both at 0,0 )

Then, in unity, when the player hits the attack key (and is within a certain distance from the enemy model) I rotate and move the enemy so that it is exactly 1 unit away from the player, and is facing the right way (so the animations match) Then i play both animations at the same time.

this works fine except sometimes it looks a bit wired when the player is a bit too far away from the enemy and the enemy sort of "teleports" to the correct location.

or when the player doesn't stand exactly behind the enemy and then the enemy sort of awkwardly just rotates 20 degrees before playing out the animation.

my question is, how do i go about making this smooth? like in assassins creed? it seems that no matter where i stand from an enemy AI, in assassins creed, the animations are always quick and smooth and the enemies doesn't have to "teleport" or "float" in to the correct locations before the animations are played out