teamLab Planets Tokyo is an arts museum awarded a Guiness Book of Records for most visited museum in the world for 2023. Two and half million visited that year and I was keen to see what all the fuss was about.

Well…OMG….A…mazing!

So what is it all about? It sells itself as a fully immersive art installation created, over several rooms, by an art collective made up of architects, artists, computer programmers and animators. Immersive because each of the rooms of the museum actually ‘disappear’ and you can smell, touch, see, create and become part of the art yourself. This may sound farfetched to some but like all art it is about your individual experience of it.

The art is split in to 3 areas : Garden, Forest and Water. The Garden, put simply, is a mirrored room with real flowers dripping downwards from the ceiling. The flowers create a colourful fragrant backdrop, but the mirrors make them look like they going on to infinity. You feel transported in to the film set of Inception or Interstellar.

Moving on to the Forest. The walls and floors here have whales, butterflies and dolphins floating around you and across varying tactile surfaces and terrains, all with massive amounts of vivid colour. It is brilliant for kids. This big kid created a pink and orange striped dolphin that was then digitalised and swam past me along a 6 metre by 20 metre wall to my shrieks of delight.

Lastly, Water, the high spot. With some trepidation you take off your shoes and socks, depositing these in a locker, before walking across a freezing cold floor in to a dark tunnel. From there you climb upwards at a 30 degree angle with water gushing towards you from a waterfall at the top of the tunnel. From then on barefoot you walk through several art instillations. The main picture is a fully mirrored room filled with thousands of light cables dropping from the ceiling. In all rooms blazes of colour change, and dance around the rooms giving different affects, ambience and thrills.

The ultimate though is when, after you are advised to lift your trousers above your knees, you enter a huge mirrored room, dimly lit and full of warm milky water. How can anything so simple be so exhilarating? The euphoria intensifies as the lights drop further and the water around your legs fills with pink stripey computer generated fish. I can’t explain the reason for this, but it fills you with a deep sense of joy.

An incredible experience and one already moving to Miami and planned for Hamburg in 2025. I predict it will move on to London some time very soon and everyone must go.

It wasn’t lost on me that the museum was two metro stops before the Disneyland Tokyo stop. I wondered if the new generation of young kids would prefer the digital experience over Mickie Mouse. The skies the limit with this type of concept.