Strictly speaking, I think that situation beats both of them. I saw True Grit yesterday and you could sum the situation there as: Young girl hires hard-bitten US marshal to avenge father's death. That's a situation with a little whiff of plot going on and even the very beginnings of some character stuff too.
Once you have a situation nailed down, you will probably find that you are working on character and plot pretty much simultaneously, the literary equivalent of patting your head while rubbing your tummy, so keep concentrating. They are so interdependent that it's almost impossible to separate one from the other, so perhaps it's just a question of emphasis or priority. There is, however, one cardinal rule, which is succinctly summed up by the late, great John Mortimer.
"It's important that the characters perform the plot and that the plot doesn't manipulate the characters."
Never make your your hero or heroine (or anyone else, for that matter) behave out of character simply to get yourself out of a difficult hole in the plot, as anything that takes place for the sake of narrative expediency will have a hollow and unconvincing ring to it. In my experience, if your characters have been developed with sufficient depth, the plot will flow from them with a kind of satisfying synergy, but it never works in reverse: plots don't create wonderful characters, good characters involve themselves in fascinating situations.
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