Loading animations dynamically seems overly complicated

I have 3 different animation clips. I want to choose one of them at runtime and load that into the Animator. I expected the code required for this to look something like this:

Code (CSharp):

1. animator = GetComponent<Animator>();
2. animator.clip = PublicallyAssignedAnimationClip01;
3. animator.play();

But this isn't how it works and the online examples do some crazy custom code to get this to work. Am I missing something really obvious?

 

you need Animator Override Controller
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/AnimatorOverrideController.html

and here are the scripts for control
https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/AnimatorOverrideController.html

 

That manual post is incredibly helpful.