Here's something interesting I've been researching over the past couple of days:
In this week's episode, there were a few shots that looked so much like what we've been calling Tate's "refined style" that I couldn't believe he'd be doing this much work uncredited -- that, and well, it's something that had popped up in other episodes, and I'd always wondered about. It's a style a lot of us picked up on in all of Tate's episodes after episode 11, but in particular, episode 38. Myself and many others have called it "Tate with time"; it's work that has a loose quality to it, but always seems a little more refined than the work that is 100% Tate's key animation. We separated it into Tate: The Animator and Tate: The Character Artist, and while that's absolutely still the case, we were very wrong in a lot of what we'd previously attributed to him. This is actually the work of
Miyako Tsuji, one of the Chief Animation Supervisors on Dragon Ball Super. He shares a lot of traits with Tate's more detailed work, but there are some subtle differences that I hadn't clocked before.
I'm sure you've seen images like these, not only in Tate's episodes, but in
Yashima's, too. In Yashima's case, I think many of us simply decided he was an inconsistent animator, and so any time his ugly pointy-nosed models popped up, he was simply scribbling out frames due to the nature of his episodes. This is clearly not the case, and if you look at the episodes he's done, you'll see that Tsuji is either a key animator or a chief supervisor. The same goes for his appearance in Tate's episodes, too. While I will show the differences between Tate's work and Tsuji's further down this post, I get the strong feeling that the two have an arrangement where Tsuji handles a lot of the supervisory work, while Tate focuses on actually animating. I say this because episode 47, which was Tate's first episode since episode 11 where Tsuji wasn't the chief supervisor, had absolutely no traces of the style we're talking about here. Outside of Ishikawa's parts, it was pure Tate, through and through.
Here's some screenshots that hopefully showcase the differences a little more clearly:
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Tate has longer faces, more slack jaws, and rounder noses. His necks tend to extend further, and everything has much more softer approach. The easiest way to tell the two apart is through the muscle detail. Tate tends use pretty loose lines to define the muscles, whereas Tsuji is a little more angular. The silly thing is, both of them vary so much depending on the scene. It's no surprise so many of us got confused. I think I have a good grasp on Tusji's art now, so it should make discerning who did what much easier in the future.
Hope this helps! It drove me crazy trying to work it out, but thankfully I got there in the end.
In other news, we now have the staff list for the upcoming episodes:
55: Seizo Toma and Kaoru Takamura
56: Naoki Tate and Shuuichiro Manabe
57: Yuichi Karasawa and Yukihiro Kitano
Wow, so Tate and Manabe are going to be paired up! That should be exciting. I kinda wish they let those two do episode 57 since that appears to be the major fight, but I can understand wanting someone like Karasawa on there for mass appeal. Hopefully he keeps Kitano in check. Tate and Manabe handling the big Super Saiyan Rose transformation and the start of the fight should be absolutely incredible. Ughhhhhh, it's so far away!
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