I've just finished reading all 6 volumes of Akira. Was the anime as good as the manga?

Depends on how you look at it. For condensing a goliath 6 volume manga series into a 2 hour movie, they did a damn good job. Of course massive amount of stuff has been changed around and cut out, but thats the only way they could do it. Its a lot like the earlier volumes of the manga. Then again I liked the first few volumes of the manga anyways. It started to piss me off around vol. 4 where it turned into "Tetsuo, Beyond the Thunderdome"

Manga > Anime by far

end of story