From LAIKA’s Mark Shapiro: When Animating Life, The Art, Science, and Wonder of LAIKA opened at the Portland Art Museum, I dreamed of putting together a canon of great stop-motion shorts that would exemplify the format’s unbelievable talent, storytelling, and art. Of course, editing it down to one block of films was the greatest challenge. What unifies these films? Tactile puppets and props and, in every case, a human hand guiding them frame-by-frame.