I think no, sprites have some limitations I discussed with Jcl a while ago (I don't remember exactly, but it was related to my lightmapper, i.e. getting skin pixel data by c_tracing, and finally I needed to create temporary models out of sprites, and then remove them... the manual does not describe it exactly).
maybe you can use a skin looking like of an animated sprite to read normal map from it. (by the way I do not use sprites any more.)