There is no built-in support for such deformation, but it can be achieved in several ways:
1) Using a custom material, by modifying the vertex shader so it takes a parameter into account to deform the sprite. However it will have a limitation because by default Sprites are quads (they are made of only 4 vertices) and so they can't be deformed with much "twist" or "roll".
2) Not using a Sprite, but a custom node that will draw using more vertices, allowing more deformation details. You can see in the first video you posted that the guy has no sprite, but a kind of mesh with lots of quads in it. This allows for smoother deformation, either from a script or from a shader by combining solution 1).
So to have deformation like that you can either use an existing asset like you pointed (not sure if it was intented only for deformation?), or roll your own solution as the ones I suggested, which require a bit of work to draw your own geometry.