Animation event not firing when out of view

We have a rather odd issue at the moment with Animation Events.

A character contains an animation which, at a particular point, calls a function on the object called Fire(). This instantiates a projectile, which is propelled for a certain distance before detonating.

A UI button controls the firing animation being triggered. When the desired frame is reached, the projectile appears, flies across the screen and detonates perfectly well. However, on running the game on device we noticed that the projectile wasn't being created while the character was off screen (it is a strategy game, hence this need). In every case, the projectile appeared and assumed its trajectory the moment that character was back on screen (even after waiting 20-30 seconds).

So I tried the following experiment back in the editor: if the game camera is moved so that the character is no longer in its frustum, will the same thing happen? Reassuringly, the projectile was still instantiated fine. HOWEVER, if the other window (scene view) was ALSO not looking at the character, we got the ignoring of the animation events. I had not realised the editor's view could actually affect the way the game behaves; is this truly the case?

To summarise: are animation events affected by being rendered (eg. is the animation component disabled at some low level), and is there a relatively painless way to get animation events to trigger regardless of camera visibility?

Thanks!