Android animation not firing immediately

Question

My project has a View that is supposed to start its tween animation (using startAnimation()) when onTouchEvent() is called. I would expect the animation to start immediately since that is what is documented. However, stepping through my code, I see it does not start until some time after onTouchEvent() has finished :-0!

Does anyone know why this is, and how to fix it?

Code is available here. The GameView has the onTouchEvent() which calls consolidateTiles() which calls animate() in the AnimateView.