I have found often times that when animating with shape keys in Blender, if I am stacking other effects or deformations on top of the shape key, it sometimes generates motion blur artifacts when rendering that are unacceptable.

My current and best method to eliminate this to:

  1. Go to the View Layer properties tab, and under Passes -> Data, ENABLE Vector pass
  2. In the Compositor editor, add a Vector Blur between the Render Layers.
    1. Input the Image output to the vector blur Image input, and the Vector output into the vector blur speed input.
    2. Drag the Image output of the Vector Blur into the Group Output or the Viewer node.

Generally, this has fixed the issues when I have experienced them.