For all your working-with-layers-on-<canvas> needs:
Konva is an HTML5 Canvas JavaScript framework that enables high performance animations, transitions, node nesting, layering, filtering, caching, event handling for desktop and mobile applications, and much more.
You can draw things onto the stage, add event listeners to them, move them, scale them, and rotate them independently from other shapes to support high performance animations, even if your application uses thousands of shapes.
There’s also a version to use with React, providing Components for all key components of Konva.