A Kid’s Adventure at teamLab Planets Tokyo

One of the first things we saw at Narita Airport outside of Tokyo, Japan, after our eleven-hour flight from San Francisco was a big wall-sized poster with two people surrounded by a big room full of swirling color. I was amazed! It was an ad for teamLab Planets, a unique kind of museum, where I knew my mom and dad and my sister Anaïs already had tickets to visit a day and a half later.

TeamLab Planets is a fun museum for kids in Tokyo. At their website, they say: “With your entire body, immerse, perceive and become one with the art.” And it really did feel like I “became one” with their different artworks.

There were different big rooms with different things. One room seemed especially big and was really dark. It was filled with milky-colored water, up to your knees, and from up above a light shined down with a projection of koi fish swimming in the water. It was so cool, like the koi were swimming all around you, and if you touched one in the water, it would explode into colorful flowers.

In one room you lay on the floor and looked up and it was like hundreds and hundreds of flowers were falling out of the sky or moving past you. One time it was just sunflowers, everywhere. Another time it was just red flowers. After you watched a while, it felt like you were moving, like you were sitting on a platform and were flying. I loved it.

In one room there was a long trampoline kind of thing and the room was dark with stars projected on the walls and the ceiling. You waited a few seconds, and down below you would see a planet, and you could bounce on the planet and it made a musical sound. My dad said it was like playing the music of the spheres. Whatever that meant. Then when you jumped on the last planet, it exploded into a big black hole. It was so cool.

There was also a coloring station where you had different oil pastels and could color in a bird or a dolphin or an airplane and then they would scan your picture into their app and your bird or dolphin or airplane would be projected on the wall.

I like coloring and do a lot at home, and I loved using the pastels to color a bird. I colored the head light green and the beak yellow, and the wings and the body blue, purple and pink. I smudged it in different places to shade the colors. Then I gave it to one of the people who worked there and she scanned it into the app.

Only a few seconds later my bird was flying across the wall, over a small city with little white houses and palm trees, and also some bigger buildings, surrounded by a lot of other birds and dolphins and airplanes that others had drawn. My bird, like all the others, was somehow now three-dimensional, not just a picture on a page.

My dad took a video of me standing against the wall, holding up the picture, and it was really fun, because when I touched the wall, where my bird was flying by, the app was interactive and suddenly my bird rapidly flew away from me. It felt like my drawing had come to life.

I would highly recommend a visit to teamLab Planets for any families visiting Tokyo. My whole family enjoyed it. It’s truly for all ages, and I’d never seen anything like it before. It’s my favorite museum ever.

BY COCO KETTMANN