When I press the play button on the Blender timeline I get the message “Anim player” pop up at the bottom of the screen. Also the animation does not seem play, the bar on the timeline moves although the animation doesn’t play on screen. This appears to be a new issue and has not occurred before. I am running Blender 4.0.2 and using the Cycles render engine for this project.
I have solved the problem by switching to rendered view(this uses selected render engine to render) from material preview(this uses Eevee to render). The animation that was playing could only be rendered in cycles therefore making it look like nothing was happening when rendered using Eevee.