Unfortunately this is not possible using $anchorScroll. As you discovered $anchorScroll doesn’t have any options and doesn’t work with $ngAnimate. In order to animate the scroll you would need to use your own service/factory or just straight javascript.
For the sake of self-learning I put together an example with a smooth scrolling service. There are probably better ways to do this so any feedback is encouraged.
To scroll to an element you attach a ng-click="gotoElement(ID)" to any element. I think an even better route would be to make this a directive.
Here’s the working example on jsFiddle.
Update
There are now a number of third-party directives for accomplishing this.
- https://github.com/oblador/angular-scroll.
- https://github.com/d-oliveros/ngSmoothScroll
- https://github.com/arnaudbreton/angular-smoothscroll
- https://gist.github.com/justinmc/d72f38339e0c654437a2