Born in 1927 in Bileća, Bosnia and Herzegovina, he died in 1998 in Krapinske Toplice. He studied architecture at the Technical Faculty in Zagreb. Since the early 1950s, he published cartoons and comics in the magazines Jež, Kerempuh, and Vjesnik. With the founding of the Duga Film Cartoon Studio in 1950, Vukotić began his pioneering work in animation. He is one of the most prominent representatives of the Zagreb School of Animated Film, to whose development he made a significant contribution. 

Vukotić received awards for his films at festivals in Oberhausen, Bergamo, San Francisco, Belgrade, London, Cannes, Melbourne, Paris, and Milan. With his film Surogat (Ersatz, 1961), he achieved the greatest success in the history of Croatian cinema—an Oscar for animated film, the first ever awarded to a non-American animated film. After 1961, he turned to film experiments: the animated-live action short film Igra (The Game, 1962) was nominated for an Oscar and awarded at festivals in Cannes and Oberhausen. In the 1970s, he achieved notable results in feature films—The Seventh Continent, Operation Stadium, Visitors from the Galaxy. Vukotić also made a number of educational and informational films. He taught film directing at the Zagreb Academy of Theatre, Film and Television and worked in animation theory. He was one of the founders of the World Festival of Animated Film – Animafest Zagreb (1972), where he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994. He was also the recipient of the Vladimir Nazor Lifetime Achievement Award and the City of Zagreb Award.