I always welcome the opportunity to learn new words and I discovered one today from an unlikely source – Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy (1981), a science fiction fantasy from Yugoslavia. In the movie, an aspiring writer questions a psychiatrist about the possibility of fictional characters from a story becoming real creations through the power of thought. The psychiatrist calls it Tellurgy – a non-existence word – but Tulpa is a noun that has the same meaning and refers to a being or object that is created in the imagination by visualization techniques. There have certainly been other movies to explore this phenomenon – Forbidden Planet (1956), Stranger Than Fiction (2006), Ruby Sparks (2019) – but Visitors of the Arkana Galaxy takes the concept in unexpected directions, employing genre parody, surrealism and a healthy dose of black comedy.
Directed by Dusan Vukotic, an animation pioneer from Yugoslavia who co-founded the famous Zagreb Animation Studio in 1953, Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy is a rare feature film from Vukotic. The cartoonist is best known for his groundbreaking animation shorts such as Igra (1962), which won the Oscar for Best Animated Short Subject, and Ars Gratia Artis (1969), in which a man devours a number of inedible objects like a vinyl record, a glass, and thumbtacks. Much of Vukotic’s animation style was greatly influenced by the work of Czech animator Jiri Trnka and John Hubley’s house style for UPA Studios. But this 1981 effort is an equally imaginative fantasy full of Vukotic’s sly humor and subversive social commentary.
It all starts when Robert (Zarko Potocnjak), a daydreamer who concocts fantasies in his head while describing them in detail to his portable recorder, is interrupted by his girlfriend Biba (Lucie Zulova). She pokes fun at his desire to be a published writer or to even hold a steady job (his position as a desk clerk at a hotel barely lasts a day). And the fact that Robert wears a space helmet while recording his flights of fancy make him seem more like a geeky teenager than an adult.
In his new story, Robert conjures up a planet called Tugador, somewhere in the Arkana Galaxy, in which three of the inhabitants, Andra (Ksenia Prohaska), a female robot, and two children Ulu (Jasminka Alic) and Targo (Rene Bitorajac), embark on a journey to Earth. Robert’s friend Hugo encourages him to add a monster since most sci-fi adventures have one so Targo ends up with a creepy looking toy called Mumu whose diminutive size is deceptive.
To give you some idea of the unpredictable and nutty nature of Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy, here are some highlights:
Robert recalls a childhood memory in the wake of his mother’s death where his father grows breasts and breast feeds him the milk he needs.
A resort caretaker is put into a hypnotic state while the alien visitors subject him to a medical examination in which is heart is removed and studied.
When a group of local residents and tourists hear that the Arkana visitors are hiding in a cave on the island, they go to meet them but the female spokesperson for the group exclaims, “No weapons. We’re kind people. Let’s take all our clothes off.” Shouting “Welcome to Planet Earth,” everyone gets completely naked (full-frontal nudity of men, women and teenagers!) in an attempt to look non-threatening.
Andra turns out to be an amazing all-purpose android who can regenerate her body parts but also can serve up meals from her Automat-like stomach cavity and dispense hot coffee and steamed milk from her fingertips.
The mischievous Targo restores Mumu to his original gargantuan size and the monster invades a wedding party in Beba’s apartment which turns into a massacre. The heads and legs of some guests are amputated by Mumu’s tenacles (one head ends up in a punch bowl and continues to talk) while others are sprayed with green bile. Another victim has his head crushed in a compact vertical shape while a blind musician plays the accordion throughout the mayhem.
Robert finally realizes that he has the power to control the situation since he is the original creator of Andra, Ulu and Targo and he happily escorts them back to their planet, knowing that he finally has a story that might be accepted for publication. In some ways, Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy is like a live action cartoon designed for teenage boys since it is full of irreverent humor, low-fi, pre-CGI special effects and moments of sheer goofiness. It might lack the visual artistry of Dusan Vukotic’s animated shorts but it remains a consistently amusing and lighthearted fantasy romp. Despite some of the macabre incidents, nobody actually dies because Andra has the power to reverse time. If things end badly, she just hits the reset button and everything starts over at an earlier point in time.
The costume design for the aliens – gold plated metallic suits – is appropriately glitzy and phony like bargain basement Halloween costumes while the music score is composed of cheesy synthesizer noises and sound effects. Most of the special effects are laughable – laser beams, floating blue orbs, explosions – but Mumu is in a class of his own. His bizarre appearance and design are credited to world renown Czech animator Jan Svankmajer (Alice, Faust, Little Otik) and you can spot some signature animation effects in some of the monster’s closeups such as teeth forming on Mumu’s stomach before he bites someone’s hand off.
The setting of Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy is especially eye-pleasing; it was filmed in and around Dubronik, Croatia on the Adriatic Sea and the rocky coastline, grottos and natural beauty of the area are an exotic and offbeat backdrop for a science fiction fantasy.
Vukotic only made two more animated shorts after Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy but scholars of his work mostly regard his final feature film as an odd one-off in his filmography and prefer his animated shorts from the late 50s/early 60s such as Cowboy Jimmy (1957), Osvetnik (1958), and Krava na Mjesecu aka Cow on the Moon (1960).
Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy isn’t for everybody but sci-fi fans with a taste for the eclectic should check it out. Glenn Erickson, a science fiction aficionado and film critic for Cinesavant describes its unique appeal: “Some of the show seems pitched like a sitcom, but like a lot of European humor, other jokes are indirect, conceptional. A point of comparion is Polanski’s Dance of the Vampires, a comedy with a giddy horror vibe that some find fatally unfunny. Director Vukotic also taps into the anything-goes absurdity of his older animated films. The cartoon logic is similar to what former Looney Tunes director Frank Tashlin brought to his live-action features: living things behave like inanimate objects, and vice-versa.”
Deaf Crocodile Films released Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy on Blu-ray in October 2025 and the disc comes with some wonderful extras including 5 of Vukotic’s animated shorts: Piccolo (1959), 1001 Crtez aka 1001 Drawings (1960), The Substitute (1961), Ars Gratia Artis (1969) and Cow on the Moon. Other extras include a commentary track by film historian Samm Deighan and an essay on Dusan Vukotic by film professor Jennifer Lynde Barker
Other links of interest:
https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/vukotic_dusan
https://www.awn.com/news/closer-look-legacy-dusan-vukotic-and-zagreb-film
https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/chronicling-a-revolution
https://kids.kiddle.co/%C5%BDarko_Poto%C4%8Dnjak
https://www.awn.com/mag/issue2.3/issue2.3pages/2.3jacksonsvankmajer.html
Cinema Sojourns 