Tim Burton Lines Up a Spot in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade

While Halloween might seem to be the holiday best suited to the macabre spirit of Tim Burton, that darkly inclined director is about to put his own spooky stamp on Thanksgiving.

Next month, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade will feature a new balloon designed by Mr. Burton, the artist and filmmaker who has brought a gothic sensibility to movies like “Beetlejuice” and “Edward Scissorhands” as well as his adaptations of “Sweeney Todd” and “Alice in Wonderland.”

“It’s such a surprise to be asked, and it was great,” Mr. Burton said in a telephone interview from London. “It’s such a surreal thing that you don’t even believe what you’re hearing. Somebody’s trying to play a joke on you or something. It had that kind of feeling.”

Mr. Burton’s contribution to the Nov. 24 parade, a character called B. Boy (or B., for short), will float alongside the familiar faces of Garfield, Snoopy and Spider-Man.

According to an origin story dreamed up by Mr. Burton, B. was created, Frankenstein’s monster-style, from the leftover balloons used in children’s parties at the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. Forbidden from playing with other children because of his jagged teeth and crazy-quilt stitching, B. retreated to a basement lair, where he obsesses over Albert Lamorisse’s film “The Red Balloon” and dreams that he, too, will be able to fly someday.

“There’s always been something about balloons,” Mr. Burton said, by way of explaining his B. Boy character. “You see them deflated and you see them floating. There’s something quite beautiful and tragic and sad and buoyant and happy, all at the same time.”

For the team behind the Macy’s parade, the involvement of Mr. Burton is its own form of wish fulfillment. His name has long been at the top of a most-wanted list for their Blue Sky Gallery series of balloons, which was introduced in 2005 and has featured inflatable designs by Tom Otterness, Jeff Koons, Keith Haring and Takashi Murakami (whose characters Kaikai and Kiki made their Macy’s parade debut last year).

After visiting the retrospective of Mr. Burton’s work at the Museum of Modern Art (ending in spring 2010) – which featured an inflatable, light bulb-like character called Balloon Boy – the parade organizers stepped up their recruitment efforts.

Bill Schermerhorn, the longtime creative director of the Macy’s parade, reached out to people he knew who were involved with the Muppets, a Disney-owned property. They in turn connected him with Don Hahn, a Disney producer who is preparing a feature-length version of “Frankenweenie,” Mr. Burton’s breakthrough short film about a dog brought back from the dead.

As Mr. Schermerhorn recalled, the response he received from Mr. Hahn was: “Well, I’m standing next to Tim. Let me hook you two up.”

This past spring, Mr. Schermerhorn and John Piper, the vice president of Macy’s parade studio, met with Mr. Burton in Britain, where he was working on a film version of the supernatural soap opera “Dark Shadows.”

There, they showed Mr. Burton some illustrations created by Tony Sarg, the puppeteer and artist who designed the balloons used in the earliest Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parades in the 1920s and ’30s, which seemed to align with Mr. Burton’s tastes.

“Let’s face it,” Mr. Schermerhorn said, “some of that art is a little scary. There’s dragons and things with big teeth, and I think Tim related to that.”

He added, “The only guideline we gave him is: Try to stay away from something skinny and pointy.”

Mr. Burton, who complied with a design for B. that was more or less round (and thus more likely to defy gravity without too many complications), compared the balloon’s creation to his work in animation, which often requires much back and forth between creative teams.

The experience also evoked for him a scene from his 1989 “Batman” film, in which the villainous Joker takes to the streets of Gotham City with a garish parody of a Thanksgiving parade, though it was unclear if the Macy’s executives knew about this scene when they tapped Mr. Burton.

“I didn’t bring it up with them,” Mr. Burton said with an impish laugh. “It wasn’t really on my mind when we were talking. It sort of hit me later.”

Compared to the bright, cheerful figures who typically populate the parade, the Macy’s staff recognizes that B. Boy, with his moody color scheme and visible scars, is about as close as it can come to pushing the envelope.

“Maybe we’re stepping into the dark side here,” said Amy Kule, the parade’s executive producer, “but Tim’s balloon, although gothic, is really fun in spirit, and nobody should be worried that it’s going to be scary or should be part of a nighttime parade rather than a daytime parade. We’re pretty cognizant about what we put in the air, and this balloon deserves to be up there with all the others.”

(Also, as Ms. Kule pointed out, the parade has already featured a fanged character in the form of Mr. Murakami’s Kiki.)

Nor did Mr. Burton see his involvement in the parade as being particularly transgressive. “I’ve always felt like my stuff was never that weird or subversive, but that’s just me thinking that,” he said. “For me, it’s pretty natural. Maybe for others, it might not be so much.”

Unlike, say, Mr. Murakami, who last year marched in the parade alongside his balloons, wearing a costume that he designed, Mr. Burton did not anticipate playing such a public role in this year’s procession.

“I’ll probably be hiding somewhere, in a building,” he said. “That’s why I’m not an actor – I’m more a stay-behind-the-camera kind of a person. My marching-band days are over. I did that way back when, and I was pretty bad at it then, so leave it to the experts.”

Still, Mr. Burton was glad to have a work that he and his partner, the actress Helena Bonham Carter, could share with their two young children, whom they are raising in Britain.

“In England, they don’t really know about it,” he said of the Macy’s parade. “Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July are days of mourning in this country. They don’t pay attention to those things.”