"Wool 100%" is an exceptionally difficult film to describe. It's about two nasty sisters who love collecting things on their daily walks. However, when they bring home some red yarn, their lives change dramatically."Wool 100%" could easily have been called "Weird 100%", as it's an incredibly strange and occasionally annoying film. It's the sort of thing you might expect from Japan and is about as far removed from a Hollywood sort of production as you can imagine! Usually, this would be a good thing but in this particular case, it was just too weird and too much. Now I am not saying I need for a film to be 'normal'. After all, one of my very favorite Japanese films is "Happiness of the Katakuris" and I also like such oddities as "Zebraman", "Tampopo" and "The Eel"--and all of these (especially "Happiness of the Katakuris") are odd films to say the least. However, unlike these other films I just didn't find the payoff for all the strangeness--it just went on and on and the loud screaming that occasionally pierced the film made me just want to turn it off. Not satisfying to me at all--and I wanted to like it.

Told like a fairy tale, this is a story about two elderly sisters who dig through trash cans for things (there must be 100 broken clocks in their mansion). One of their finds is a tilting toy with a girl's face, a doll. That night, they encounter a girl who is knitting a red sweater, for which it seems when she's finished she has to start all over again. The story tells of the relationship between her and the sisters, with some unusual links to their childhoods. This film is very unusual, its ideas are very out there, but its a well told story and the mix of live action, animation & puppets is definitely interesting. If you like quirky films, you'll like this. I want to also say that this was Kyoko Kashida's last film. She has had an interesting film career, actually making this film not so unusual a casting choice for her. She was a star of "Woman Of The Dunes" and "Mangi", both films done more than forty years before this one. Thank you for your gift to Japanese cinema Ms. Kashida, and may you rest in peace.

Two elderly sisters live in a house piled up and over with junk. They go on daily scavenging expeditions to find new stuff which they bring home and meticulously catalog. One day they discover some red yarn which they bring home and in the night a girl with a knitting obsession breaks in and repeatedly knits and unpicks a sweater for herself.The first half of this film is charming. Some of the subtle humour might be lost on a western audience - for example one of the sisters has a western style of dressing and eating while the other has an eastern/Japanese style, and some of the comedy is in the Japanese descriptions of the drawings they make of their junk.However the story loses its way after this. You can almost see the director's thought processes here: How do we resolve this film? Why are the two sisters living together? Obviously the answer involves War and Love Lost. The girl turns out to be pretty annoying. The house gets cleaned up and cleared out (thereby losing all its charm!). The plot starts to fall apart as we segue back in time, and I found it hard to fathom exactly what was going on for the last bit. Nevertheless the animation is great fun - think "Happiness of the Katakuris" for something similar.7/10 - worth watching but don't be expecting greatness.

Japanese cinema certainly has a lock on the "weird" genre. Films like Survive Style 5, Tamala: Punk Cat in Space, Party 7 could only be made in Japan, no other country seems to have the ability to let film makers experiment in such ways. Wool 100% is certainly in league with these other films although it could be considered a "women's weird" film.Two elderly sisters live in a mansion piled to the roof, inside and out, with things they have found in the trash. On one of their daily trash expeditions they come across a pile of brilliant red yarn. They bring it home but that night a strange, wild girl breaks into their house and starts to knit the yarn into a formless sweater. Once finished, the girl screams with an un- natural voice, pulls the sweater apart and starts to knit again. The sisters don't know what to do as the girl refuses to leave and starts to wreck the house. Slowly the girl's presence changes the sisters' attitude to the trash hoard and we start to learn about their past.The film is quite a bit stranger than the description but that's the basic plot for the first 30 minutes. Well-photographed and with a quirky soundtrack dominated by a baritone saxophone the film has two animated segments as well. The director got her start in animation and the watercolor and crayon animation in the middle of the film shows it. It's an amazing sequence however it's not in the anime tradition.The film starts to slow down by the last third but it's still wonderful in many ways.