Neighbourhood Dragoncat

Before he left early for the day (hopefully without first infecting me with whatever ails him), Pablo asked me about a DVD of My neighbour Totoro his wife had bought. Despite having a parallel title in English on the cover, it turned out to be in some other language and they weren't sure what. I glanced, saw kana, and said it must be in Japanese. But I was puzzled by the presence of the characters "龙猫" ("dragon cat") under "トトロ". At first, I thought this might be something to do with that crazy Japanese habit of using completely arbitrary and unpredictable readings for names (e.g. the comic title 悪魔, read "Deimos"). But I was surprised not to have encountred this before. I had a closer look and saw that it was actually a Mainland Chinese release.

But the questions didn't end there. To confirm my suspicions, I looked up the film in the English Wikipedia and then went to the Chinese version of the page. The default version of this is Mainland in simplified characters, but the title it gives is not "龙猫" but "邻居托托罗" (a literal translation of the Japanese name incorporating a transcription of "Totoro" into Mandarin pronunciation). Out of habit, I changed the display to Taiwanese Mandarin with traditional characters and the title changed to "龍貓", the traditional equivalent of "龙猫". Neither version of the article uses the half-transcribed title again, so I'm not really sure what is going on.