I've definitely grown to dislike Tate's animation as Super went on. I feel like I liked him at first because, well, there really wasn't any other choice, was there? Everyone was terrible and Tate was really the only putting out actual fluid and interesting animation. But as the production got better, the animators started being able to cope with the harsh schedule and animators like Shida started being brought in to animate some cuts, Tate's flaws have become more apparent to me.
I feel like a great part of what turns me off about his animation are the awkward poses. I'm sure everyone is familiar by this point with
this frame. People wouldn't complain about it for no reason. It's awkward-looking. It wouldn't be a problem if it were an in-between but it's not, it stays on-screen for a relatively long period of time, long enough where you can notice it and break your immersion. That's not the only one, here's
another,
another one and
one more. These
feel like they should be in-betweens but they're not, they just awkwardly stay in place for a few seconds. There are countless of other examples in Tate's work.
My main personal gripe with him is his art style. I don't like it. It doesn't feel like Dragon Ball. The
big noses, the
chubby hands, the
round ears way above the jawline, the
long chins, the
facial expressions that look straight-up like something Luffy would pull, the
round and wobbly eyes. It's all very un-Dragon Ball. Dragon Ball is angular, the rounded shapes have been abandoned ever since the Freeza arc. When you combine his art style, which lacks detail, with his fluid animation, most of the time it just looks like big blobs of different colors flying around and fighting each other. I know an animator doesn't need to stick with the character sheets, but what makes someone like Shida so good is that his animation is fantastic
and his art is detailed, especially his shading; you can at least recognize that it
looks like Dragon Ball, perhaps not his particular style of animation, but at least his art does. You can criticize Yamamuro all you want, but he's much closer to Toriyama's style than Tate. When you get to a Tate scene, you receive a sort of animation whiplash akin to watching an episode by Nakatsuru or Yamamuro in the old days and then watching one by Ebisawa or Uchiyama. Of course Tate's work is technically superior to these two, but that doesn't really matter, the point is the significant difference between Tate's art style and everyone else working on the show.
Don't hate me, Ajay.