The Surreal Life of 'Sea Lion Cow' 

If you are a parent, you know this scenario well: Your child does something cute so you bust out your phone. Mine has countless videos and photos of my son from all ages, generally never revisited. For the Fratkin family, however, one of these random moments has turned, extraordinarily, into a short film selection in the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival.

It was in the car on the way to preschool more than a decade ago that then 4-year-old Bella Fratkin began singing a sweet little tune she named "Sea Lion Cow." Her father Michael Fratkin pressed record on his phone, capturing the melody. As he remembers, he was instantly enchanted with its nonsensical beauty. At home he played the song for his wife, who was equally smitten. After that, every so often, he played the tune for friends. One such friend was Gideon Irving, a professional musician who has spent his career as a self-proclaimed "globetrotting house showman," performing one-person shows everywhere from living rooms to private yurts, festivals and more.

At the time, in 2013, Irving was more of a friend-of-a-friend who was looking to play shows in Humboldt. The Fratkins invited him to perform and stay at their home. It was while eating pancakes the morning after Irving's house show that Fratkin shared his daughter's song. "I played it for him and he was just kind of blown away," says Fratkin. "It landed for him in such a special way and he asked if I would send it to him. It kind of became part of his inner soundtrack, I guess."

The song so touched Irving that he used it as the alarm clock chime on his phone. "I would wake up to it, literally for years. It was hauntingly beautiful and peculiar in these slight, gentle mysterious ways," he says. "The more I kept playing it and listening to it, the more I fell in love with it. I'm always striving to make things that don't need to make sense or be understood, but that can be felt. I thought Bella's song was a great example of that."

Flash-forward a few years to Irving writing an off-Broadway production about himself, mortality and related themes, "Sea Lion Cow" still thrumming away at him. The song was integral to his show. So, he wrote Bella a letter asking if he could license her tune for a small fee. Bella, then in elementary school, was a little embarrassed that her dad still shared the song with friends, but licensed by a professional? The answer was yes.

What Bella had considered "that silly song" took on a life of its own. "Sea Lion Cow" was a fixture in Irving's six-week theatrical run. The show featured Bella's voice in certain parts, Irving singing in others. And then it was over. The song fell quiet.

But a few years later, Irving again wrote to Bella. This time, he was recording an album and wanted "Sea Lion Cow" on it. Again, he asked Bella's permission and offered payment. Again, her answer was yes. He cleaned the recording up and put it on his album (which is available on Spotify).

Then, about a year ago, Irving sent a different sort of letter. It was an apology. He had used "Sea Lion Cow" without Bella's permission. This time the song was the backbone of a short film shot on the G train in New York City. His friend and neighbor Ivan Cash had been working on a commercial shoot and had some 48-hours left with amazing high quality production tools. He had pitched Gideon on making a music video with the time they had left, and "Sea Lion Cow" was the song they used.

When Ivan pitched the high-speed project to him, Gideon's response was that it was an absurd, terrible idea. And that he was in. They had less than 24 hours to create their idea and no time to discuss and tweak things. They just went with it and shot their film on the subway, with strangers milling about and a vague notion of having lots of plants on the train.

"It was very guerrilla style," says Irving. "We had less than 24 hours to plan and then three hours with everyone. Everyone was just throwing in ideas with no guarantees it would all come together. We almost got kicked off the train a couple of times. We were navigating a small car accident when the art truck plowed into a parked car. We had to clean up pee in the public elevator so we could transport all our plants downstairs. It was all really wild."

Accepting Irving's after-the-fact apology and once again giving her blessing to the song's usage, the now-teenage Bella suddenly was thrust into post-production work for the professional movie. She took part in creative decision-making and other aspects of film clean-up, engaging in lengthy phone calls with Gideon. The largest part of their work together was creating a whimsical creature to represent the sea lion cow, a shaggy, colorful animation that appears toward the film's end. While the shooting of the film took only a few hours, the design of the animated creature took some four months.

"We both wanted it to represent my childhood. Just have it be kind of wondrous, representing my little playful, imaginative younger self," says Bella. "So, we worked together to come up with something that was visual but not a real sea lion cow. I wanted it to be kind of like a Bigfoot, a weird creature. It's just such a part of Humboldt culture and my childhood."

When all the work was done, the big thing happened. The film, submitted to festivals, was accepted at Tribeca.

"Some 8,000 films were submitted to the Tribeca festival for the short programs. And poof! Sea Lion Cow got in,'" says the elder Fratkin. With only 77 films chosen and Sea Lion Cow one of them, the Fratkins were compelled to go to New York City and experience it for themselves. Dad and daughter set off on a whirlwind weekend in June to attend the premiere. There, Bella was included as part of the film crew and part of the celebration.

For her, the whole thing has represented a bit of the end of her childhood and the beginning of a new phase of life. As she heads to University of California at Santa Cruz in the fall, she says that the film and "Sea Lion Cow" have not necessarily changed her current plans to go into social work, despite the connections to people in the music and film industry it's yielded. But they have affirmed her belief in herself and opened some possibilities for the future.

"I was probably 8 or 10 when [Gideon] first contacted me. I was like, 'What in the world? You want to use a song I wrote on the way to preschool? You want to pay me money to use this song?' I was like, 'Yeah, go for it, dude,'" says Bella. "But I think even back then I felt really affirmed. Now, if I ever question myself, like the purest form of myself, I can remember that as a young child I had creativity and a light inside that people can recognize."

Tamar Burris (she/her) is a freelance education writer and relationship coach. Her book for children of divorce A New Special Friend is available through her website tamarburris.com.