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Minnesotan behind ‘Inside Out 2’ helps kids name ‘hard emotions’
Pixar’s second installment of the movie features characters we’ve already met — Joy, Sadness and Anger — and gives them a new roommate named Anxiety.
MINNEAPOLIS — Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” universe plays out inside the mind of the movie’s adolescent protagonist, Riley.
She plays a kid from Minnesota whose family uproots her life by moving to San Francisco. But did you know that what plays out in Riley’s mind actually comes from the mind of a real-life Minnesotan?
“You are one of us!” said Breaking the News anchor Jana Shortal.
“Yes, I am!” said Burnsville native and the movie’s creator and director, Kelsey Mann.
Mann was chosen for the role by ANOTHER Minnesotan — Pete Docter, the man behind the original movie, “Inside Out.”
“I don’t know if Pete asked me to do this movie because I was from Minnesota and he was from Minnesota … I just think it worked out that way,” Mann said.
How two guys from the south metro made a pair of Pixar movies that would change the game is a hell of a story that began with Docter in 2015.
“He [Docter] was just trying to tell a fun story — an emotional, fun story — and didn’t realize how much it would help give kids a vocabulary to talk about things they were feeling because they are feeling those emotions, but they’re really hard to talk about,” Mann said.
Some parents, counselors and teachers might even tell you it did more good for kids than just entertain them. It unlocked their emotions and begged for what Mann set out to create at the beginning of 2020.
“That part was fun, particularly fun,” he said. “I think the daunting part was following up a film that everyone really loved.”
But Mann knew what he wanted to do with the movie’s follow-up, “Inside Out 2.”
“Diving into Riley’s adolescence … that was just fun,” he said.
This time around, Riley is 13, hitting puberty and facing all of what, and who, comes with it. The franchise’s second installment features characters we’ve already met — Joy, Sadness and Anger — and gives them a new roommate named Anxiety.
“I think that’s what’s fun about the ‘Inside Out’ world: You can take something we all know and give it a face,” Mann said. “We can give anxiety a name and a face.”
The film follows Riley’s emotions fighting it out for control of her life. Joy wants Riley to stay young and hold on only to joy, while anxiety is hell-bent on taking over Riley over at the age of 13 because as a lot of us know, that’s when anxiety often moves in.
“I always pitched it as a takeover movie, like an emotional takeover,” Mann said. “Anxiety can kind of feel like that; it can take over and kind of shove your other emotions to the side and repress them.”
For a kids’ movie, it’s hard to watch this animation play out, even when an adult has the keys to decide.
“I’m making a movie about anxiety and I still have to remind myself to have my anxiety take a seat,” Mann said.
All of our individual anxieties have a place in this world.
“The whole movie honestly is about acceptance. Both acceptance of anxiety being there and also of your own flaws,” said Mann.
Even for our kids, we have to remember that this is life.
Anxiety will come for them; it does for us all.
The “Inside Out” world just shows them it’s so.
Among those at the start line this year will be Alex Vigil.
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David Wellstone plans to turn iconic green campaign bus into a touring center of hope and unity.
NORTHFIELD, Minn. — Time has taken a toll on the iconic Wellstone Green bus, but the late Senator’s son, David, has launched an effort to revive it as a touring beacon of hope and healing and unity.
He has launched an ambitious automotive rehab project with the help of a lot of friends, including Benjamin Bus in Northfield, which is handling the mechanical part of the overhaul. Another Wellstone friend, Tim Schubert of Trobec’s Bus Service, has agreed to take on the bodywork.
“Public service is why he got into office, and I think people are not as excited anymore about politics, young people in particular,” David Wellstone told KARE. “And I think we’re very divided, and so I’m hoping this can be a way to bring people together and also excite folks about what politics can really be about.”
While most remember the late Senator Paul Wellstone as a liberal populist firebrand, he also became known on Capitol Hill for reaching across the aisle on bipartisan issues such as mental health parity. It’s what led David Wellstone to move from building houses to working in the mental health field.
“I hope people can think about what my dad did, working on certain issues, where he could bring together bipartisan support, things like mental health, addiction, human trafficking,” Wellstone remarked.
The 1968 Chevrolet school bus had already been converted into a camping bus by the time the Wellstone campaign bought it in 1990. It became symbolic of the upstart underdog Senate campaign of the Carleton College professor turned Democrat activist.
“I do remember even the Democrats, when he wanted to run, ‘You’re what?!’ Talk about underdog! No one wanted him! They even thought, ‘Who is this wild guy’?”
The green bus was featured in Wellstone’s unconventional TV ads that helped propel him to an upset victory over incumbent Republican Rudy Boschwitz. It became a regular part of his rallies and campaign travel.
Those old wheels didn’t hold up as well as the politician in it. KARE 11’s file video vaults include footage of the green bus undergoing emergency repairs while making a victory lap trip to Washington, DC in 1990.
“I think it broke down three times on that trip to DC. Paul Scott and Dick Miller were the drivers, and they both had some mechanical chops,” Wellstone recalled.
“We’re lucky we’ve got Benjamin Bus here, the Northfield company, that’s got some really great mechanics on it. So, hopefully once they get it up and running, I’m going to be the driver. They’re going to train me.”
The interior is pretty much just as it was when Paul and Sheila Wellstone, their daughter Marcia, and five others died in a 2002 plane crash near Eveleth. Their sudden deaths sent shock waves through Minnesota and across the nation, and it came in the final weeks of Wellstone’s campaign for his third term in the U.S. Senate.
The interior will be cleaned up, to deal with the ravages of decades of storage in various places, but it will remain as a time capsule of how it looked during that ill-fated 2002 campaign. The photos and posters that were on the walls when Paul Wellstone used it as a rolling headquarters will remain.
The one change David Wellstone has in mind is adding a TV monitor that will show his father’s speeches on a loop.
“He was a wonderful speaker, and he spoke with conviction because he believed everything he was saying, and I would love to have that for people to see.”
You can track the rehab project’s progress on the Paul Wellstone’s Green Bus Facebook page, which is run by a nonprofit of the same name.
Why now? Wellstone said the idea had been on his radar for some time, but he was moved to action by the public’s overwhelming response to a Star Tribune “Curious Minnesota” column explaining what had happened to the bus in the past 22 years.
“This bus seems to be resonating with people, and it cuts across party lines. When we towed this into town on a flatbed trailer, drivers were flashing their lights at us. We were driving through countryside with Trump signs in the fields.”
He plans to drive it across the state, with stops that allow visitors to walk inside and ask questions. The venues he has in mind range from small town parades to homeless encampments.
“That’s what the bus is going to do. It’s going to touch people,” the younger Wellstone remarked. “To me, there’s the bus, but then there’s how it’s going to affect people. And I think that’s the big thing.”
You might say only a dreamer could look at that old bus in its current condition and see a teaching museum on wheels. But, then again, dreaming big runs in David Wellstone’s family.
The crash happened on I-35W in Minneapolis.
MINNEAPOLIS — A 19-year-old has died after a motorcycle crash on I-35W last week.
It happened around 5 p.m. on the interstate near 36th Street. Minnesota State Patrol said the teen, identified as Kaeden Devon Price, was driving at a high rate of speed when he sideswiped a Jeep Wrangler and then rear-ended a Ford F150.
Price, from Blaine, was taken to the Hennepin County Medical Center with life-threatening injuries on Sept. 24. Officials said he was wearing a helmet and alcohol was not involved.
On Friday, the Hennepin County Medical Examiners Office said Price had died from injuries in the crash. A GoFundMe set up for his family said he was taken off life support and his organs were being donated. An honor walk was held to celebrate his life and the lives his donation would save.
The other drivers involved in the crash were not hurt, state patrol said.
