Lila Sawyer

Lila Sawyer is a fictional character in the Nickelodeon animated series Hey Arnold!. She is voiced by Ashley Buccille.

A cute, freckle-faced redhead, she is an optimistic, kind and considerate country-girl. In "Ms. Perfect", she is shown to be as smart as Phoebe, to be as stylish as Rhonda and funny. She is very talented. According to the official Hey Arnold! website, she took ballet for two years and can sing and write songs as seen in "Eugene, Eugene". Lila is also unusually sophisticated. Not many girls her age, especially from the country, show an avid interest in performance arts.

First appearance
Lila was introduced in the season two episode "Ms. Perfect", where she is a new student to P.S. 118 and the city, having lived the majority of her life in the country-side. The girls at first try to instruct her of city-life, and educate her in adapting to the school and its many intricacies. To their surprise, Lila is extremely smart, fashionable, funny and kind, having virtually no problem with fitting in. They became jealous of how seemingly perfect she is, eventually deciding she must be humiliated. After a string of set-backs, the girls, led by Helga, actually succeed. When asked to deliver Lila's homework to her, the girls discover Lila is financially disadvantaged (albeit temporarily). Feeling bad for her and guilty themselves, they decide to reconcile.

She is one of five people who know of Helga's obsession for Arnold, the other four being Phoebe, Patty Smith, Brainy and Helga's psychiatrist. She shows no knowledge of this during the rest of the series, indicating she chose to respect Helga's feelings and refused to exploit it.

Relationship with Arnold
Out of all of the crushes Arnold had on the show, Lila was his only technical girlfriend. In the season three episode "Arnold & Lila", Helga writes on a wall "Arnold loves Helga". However, when she sees the girls approaching, she hastily changes it to read "Arnold loves Lila". Lila sees this, and, encouraged by the other girls, believes that Arnold really does like her and is just too shy to tell her in person. Lila then insists on spending as much time with Arnold as possible, although Arnold doesn't like Lila in that way. He tells her after a few dates, and an upset Lila leaves him alone.

After Lila left, Arnold realized that he really did like Lila in "that way", but after confessing to her, Lila reveals that after much thought, she only liked Arnold as a friend. The continuity of their relationship is further questioned when in the season five episode Helga's Locket, Arnold is revealed to have a photograph of Lila taped to his computer monitor. It was also questioned again when Lila said "There was hope" at the end of the season four episode "Love and Cheese."

The relationship was given a more definitive statement when it resurfaced again during season five in the episode "Married" when Arnold showed a sudden interest/delight in Rhonda's marriage predictor when Lila was mentioned. Arnold also harbored feelings for Lila longer than any other girl on the show, lasting three seasons, but his crush on Lila finally ended in Timberly loves Arnold.

Lila Sawyer