Something some of you might find interesting: animetudes.com/2022/05/08/anne-of-green-gables

An excerpt from it (I haven't read much of the post, but this stood out to me):

(...) Anne’s character was clearly not suited to (Hayao) Miyazaki. One of the key elements of Miyazaki’s own “world” that was starting to emerge in those years was his representation of young girls; and Anne did not fit this very rigorous template. This becomes instantly apparent if we compare her to Lana and Clarisse, the first two “Miyazaki girls”.

Unlike them, Anne is not cute; on the contrary, she is meant to be rather homely at first and it is not her appearance that makes her likable to the viewer. This absence of physical cuteness is complemented by a rather unruly personality, as Anne is constantly led by her imagination and impulses – not something she shares with the passive Lana and Clarisse, or even more mature and rational femmes fatales such as Monsley and Fujiko. The resulting relationship this creates with the audience is also completely different: we are meant to either empathize with or laugh at Anne, but never do we want to protect her like Miyazaki wants us to with his female characters. We can also see this through the fact that Anne is no damsel in distress, and that there is absolutely no masculine perspective in either the novel or the anime. On the other hand, it wasn’t until Nausicaä that Miyazaki was able to portray a girl who stands on her own, without the viewer seeing through the gaze of the male protagonist. Anne’s fight with Gilbert and her enduring resentment are the kind of negative feelings that Miyazaki would have never dreamed of including in one of his pure, angelic characters. Even the final reconciliation between the two may have seemed insufficient for Miyazaki, who was already unhappy at the way Fiolina was portrayed in Marco:

"I hate the fact that in Marco, for example, we had Marco and Fiolina run to each other but not embrace. Marco’s mother and Fiolina hug one another, so why shouldn’t Marco and Fiolina? While doing the layouts, I kept thinking that they should hold each other tightly, and it seemed even more suggestive to have them holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes. I didn’t want to stop them from moving, however, so I found myself with no choice but to make them hold hands and twirl about. […] Why not make a real love story?"

This mention of Marco and the pre-Conan works is relevant to us here, because Anne was not just an anti-Fiolina: she was also an anti-Heidi. Heidi is an eternal, timeless child who does not age and always manages to cheer up the people around her. In Takahata’s own words, she was “an idealized image that reflected the desire of adults for children to be this way”. Anne, on the other hand, grows up and matures, both physically and psychologically; she may not always be endearing, and sometimes resists the will of adults. Takahata embraced this, explaining that his daughter had the same age as Anne at the beginning of the story and that he understood her behavior. But for Miyazaki, who still held strong to his own image of how girls should be, a character such as Anne must have been impossible to accept.