Yes, there are several ways. As I recall, one is to use the Lightning Attack ability. You can set the animation for that to Spell and then remove the actual lightning animation and so on.
In general, any ability like Lightning Attack, Pulverize, etc. can be used for that but Lightning Attack is the general go to one since it doesn't do much else.
Edit: testing this out again, I couldn't get Lightning Attack or Pulverize to play spell animations, just different attack animations. There are still several possible solutions, one of which is using the model editor to rename the red dragon's animations (e.g. rename its spell slam to attack and its current attack to something else).