While it may not be the first animated graphic novel, the baseball animations are amazing. Not awkward or unnatural at all. Very fluid and exciting and so well done that it's not obvious how hard that must have been to get the body movements right.
I guess you could say +1 is still a relatively new feature. It appears that it's something Google just released without a clear end goal in mind of how to integrate it across all of their social networks.
I'm hoping that they have something new and different in mind with how they integrate +1's into Google+. It's slightly annoying as a user to be presented with so many share/like buttons on a post. As it was mentioned in the blog post, what's the incentive for a user to choose the +1 button. There needs to be a benefit beyond just making the +1 viewable in your Google+ stream.