I recall having done animated GIF with GD... but the same program fails to run on my current machine with the error you reported.

My guess is that the version check is broken: libgd version 2.3.3 reports itself as 2.0303. Perl people should be well aware about version numbers with zeroes and the problems of comparing them.

Contrary to what other monks are saying about "too old", I'd rather try to install an older version of Strawberry Perl. They all come with a version of libgd, for example Strawberry Perl 5.32 has libgd 2.2.5, and if I recall correctly, I did my animated GIF with 5.32.