A Discovery Pan in Fast and Furry-ous
At right you can see a discovery pan from the Chuck Jones animated short, Fast and Furry-ous. The pan moves from right to left and "discovers" Coyote harnessed to his new contraption, a ski-refrigerator, in his latest attempt to catch the elusive bird, Road Runner.This sequence, then, is part of the plot that builds on the basic story: coyote hunts bird.
The sequence is done in a certain style, in this instance, a discovery pan.
The style develops the theme: as the camera "pans" from the first empty crate, across several other empty crates, to the final "discovery" of Coyote attached to his refrigerator on skiis, it develops the main idea of Coyote's useless quest; a quest (desire) that has possessed him so much that he has become that quest (like a lover madly chasing the woman of his dreams, to the point where he has forgotten everything else and has become his passion).
The quest itself is based in pride: the idea that science or technology (the objects in the crates) can somehow fulfill Coyote's desires. Thus Coyote stands for Mankind, for Man's mad dependence on technology to solve his elusive desires, which of course only gets him deeper into failure, as in the case of Coyote.
Finally, the discovery pan is part of a genre called the "animated cartoon." Genre is a convention of style and plot that helps to narrate certain stories best.
For example, Westerns tell stories of the Old West: "the trek West to the American Promised Land." These stories are best narrated in the plots and style of the genre called Western: bad cowboy vs. good cowboy; settlers vs. Indians; gunfight; barroom brawl, saloon girl vs. good girl, etc. The style usually requires natural lighting around campfires; bright lighting across open plains, etc.
Horror films use plots to tell stories of monsters. These plots involve mad scientists; hunchbacks; gypsies; haunted castles; electrical machinery; lightning and thunder. Style includes expressionistic lighting with lots of shadows, tilted camera angles, etc.
Fast and Furry-ous belongs to the genre of the animated cartoon, which tells stories of basic adveraries: bird and cat; mouse and cat; rabbit and predators; etc. Plots involve repetition of the main story element of pursuit: the chase.
This is true in early live-action comedy shorts too, such as Laurel and Hardy, Chaplin, Keaton, etc. But the plot element of the chase is exaggerated more so in the cartoon short, as in Chuck Jones' and other Warner Brothers cartoons, such as Tweety Bird, Bugs Bunny (and Elmer Fudd), Daffy Duck, and the Road Runner cartoons.
The Road Runner cartoons are the most stylized of all. For there's nothing (not even dialogue) but the chase itself and the schemes to win the chase, which always ends in failure, teaching a moral lesson among the laughs.
Thus Story, Plot, Genre, Theme, and Style all work together in the making of the work of art, which we call the genre film.
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