We present a trade-off technique for fast but qualitative planar shape deformation using a layered mesh. We construct a layered mesh that is embedding a planar input shape; the upper-layer is denoted as a control mesh and the other lower-layer as a shape mesh that is defined by mean value coordinates relative to the control mesh. First, we try to preserve some shape properties including user constraints for the control mesh by means of a known existing nonlinear least square optimization technique, which produces deformed positions of the control mesh vertices. Then, we compute the deformed positions of the shape mesh vertices indirectly from the deformed control mesh by means of simple coordinates computation. The control mesh consists of a small number of vertices while the shape layer contains relatively a large number of vertices in order to embed the input shape as tightly as possible. Since the time-consuming optimization technique is applied only to the control mesh, the overall execution is extremely fast; however, the quality of deformation is sacrificed due to the sacrificed quality of the control mesh and its relativity to the shape mesh. In order to change the deformation behavior and consequently to compensate the quality sacrifice, we present a method to control the deformation stiffness by incorporating the orientation into the user constraints. According to our experiments, the proposed technique produces a planar shape deformation fast enough for real-time applications on limited embedded systems such as cell phones and tablet PCs.