We study the anisotropic effect of the Coulomb interaction on a 1/3-filling fractional quantum Hall system by using an exact diagonalization method on small systems in torus geometry. For weak anisotropy the system remains to be an incompressible quantum liquid, although anisotropy manifests itself in density correlation functions and excitation spectra. When the strength of anisotropy increases, we find the system develops a Hall-smectic-like phase with a one-dimensional charge density wave order and is unstable towards the one-dimensional crystal in the strong anisotropy limit. In all three phases of the Laughlin liquid, Hall-smectic-like, and crystal phases the ground state of the anisotropic Coulomb system can be well described by a family of model wave functions generated by an anisotropic projection Hamiltonian. We discuss the relevance of the results to the geometrical description of fractional quantum Hall states proposed by Haldane. © 2012 American Physical Society.